Interview Post: Carolyn Ciesla

Biographical

Name?
Carolyn Henley Ciesla

Current job?
Instructional Services Librarian and Associate Professor at a smallish (2,900 FTE) community college in the south Chicago suburbs.

How long have you been in the field?
I received my MLIS in 2010 but have been working the library field since 2008. I jumped from public to academic libraryland in 2013.

How Do You Work?

What is your office/workspace like?
I have my own office!!! (Extra exclamation points because this was a first for me.) I try to keep it tidy, but by the end of the semester I’m lucky if I can see the actual surface of my desk. I also want my office to represent me, so I have a GIANT bulletin board with lots of collected memorabilia and silly items, as well as my fandom shelf.

How do you organize your days?

My teaching schedule is getting heavier, so between that and time at the reference desk – and MEETINGS! – I don’t have a lot of time to just sit and work. As a result, I have to be strict with my days if I want to get anything done. Mornings are usually when I try to work on brain-heavy activities, like writing or course/lesson planning. Afternoons are for catching up on professional reading and answering emails.

What do you spend most of your time doing?

I feel like I spend the most amount of time scrambling to finish something because I either put it off or had other things I had to finish first. I’d like to get away from the “headless chicken” model of working.

What is a typical day like for you?

Part of why I love being a librarian is that no two days are exactly the same. They usually involve some combination of: teaching, meeting with students, meeting with other faculty, meeting with my dean, sitting at the reference desk, helping someone (or several someones) print something, checking my email, checking my email again, opening too many tabs and never being able to read everything, did I mention checking my email?, oh, and internally panicking about all the things.

What are you reading right now?

For work: I have, like, seven articles right now on my desk, some for classes and some for me, plus several back issues of C&RL News. For pleasure: Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. It’s a story about WWII told from several converging points of view, and it’s gorgeous and heartbreaking. I’m taking a departure from my usual horror/suspense/dystopia titles.

What's the best professional advice you've ever received?

Here’s the thing: I’m sure I’ve received wonderful advice. It’s just… I can’t remember any of it. (Future advice givers: don’t bother with me. I won’t remember it.) Let’s just all assume it was moving and inspirational and motivating.

What have you found yourself doing at work that you never expected?

Telling people to walk around the vomit.

Inside the Library Studio

What is your favorite word?

It changes regularly but is always something fun to say. Right now, it’s flibbertigibbet.

What is your least favorite word?

Pus.

What profession other than your own would you love to attempt?

Movie trailer editor.

What profession would you never want to attempt?

Podiatrist. Dentist. I can’t deal with other people’s feet or mouths.

Everything Else

What superpower do you wish you had?

Teleportation. I hate flying.

What are you most proud of in your career?

The little moments when I’m teaching or talking to a student and it clicks. Then they give me a high five.

If you're willing to share, tell about a mistake you made on the job.

I am an organizational mess, and I’m in charge of several schedules. I’ve double-booked classrooms, I’ve neglected to turn in important forms, and I’ve forgotten to schedule coverage for missed shifts. It’s taught me to write everything down, and take time to complete each task before moving on to another.

When you aren't at work, what are you likely doing?

Napping. Driving. (Ha, I typed drinking instead of driving. Sure, that too.) Hanging out with my husband and daughter.

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Amy Watson


Carolyn is on Twitter as @papersquared. This her second post for LtaYL. The first was "All In: Getting the Most Out of the ACRL Immersion Program."

Dressing for Interviews: An Extended Answer

I've been an on-again-off-again contributor to the "Further Questions" series on Hiring Librarians. The "off-again" part is because sometimes I don't have any experience from which to answer or I'm just too busy, so I'm glad I had a moment when the question that was published yesterday showed up in my email.

The question:

"Which outfit is most appropriate to wear to an interview with your organization? Please pick one for women and one for men, and feel free to provide commentary as to why you chose one over the others (or share how you might change an outfit). Bonus question: Can you share any funny stories about horrifying interview outfits?" (There are options from which respondents chose at that link.)

My answer:

"Since gender isn't a binary, I say you wear whatever you feel is appropriate to the level for which you're applying. In general, dress just a little bit nicer than you think you would dress if you got the job. If you feel unsure, check with a friend/contact who already has a job in the kind of library where you are interviewing. Don't know anyone? Feel free to reach out to me and I'll get you in touch with someone who can help."

I feel the need to expand upon what I wrote there, partially because I'm still angry at the assumption of gender as a binary and partially because of the great discussion that happened on Twitter and other places after that Hiring Librarians post was published.

Here are some things that I know are true:

• I've talked before about my privilege (or lack thereof), but it's important to note that since I'm caucasian and mostly cisgendered I can bend or even break some of the so called interview outfit fashion rules with relative impunity. YMMV.
• Performance of gender and performance of race factor into this in a big way.
• I already have a job in a library, so in some ways it's easy for me to talk.
• But I am also fat, and fat prejudice is a problem.

Having explained all that, I still stand by my answer. Wear what feels appropriate. Wear an outfit that makes you feel confident but that is also comfortable. I suggest you avoid high heels unless you are super used to walking around in them all day, because you will be walking much more than you expect to walk. I also suggest you dress appropriate for the weather, for the most part. If you don't think you can dress following my advice and still stand a chance at getting a job offer, please consider turning the interview down. Remember you're going to be at this library a lot, and if you won't feel comfortable dressing the way you normally dress while at work, you will not be happy there.  

One last thing... If I'm ever lucky enough to interview you for employment at my library, please rest assured that "it don't matter what you wear, [we're] checking out your savoir faire" and - of course - your qualifications.

(I hope you'll forgive the light hearted videos that are bookending this post. I needed to find a way to laugh about this and thought you might need a laugh, too.)

Interview Post: Baharak Yousefi

Biographical

Name?
Baharak Yousefi

Current job?
Head, Library Communications at Simon Fraser University

How long have you been in the field?
8 years.

How Do You Work?

What is your office/workspace like?
Things about my office that make me happy are: a large wall-mounted laser-cut Arundhati Roy quote, my standing desk, and the Brutalist architecture of Arthur Erickson who designed SFU’s Bennett Library, where my office is located.

How do you organize your days?

I use my university’s officially sanctioned e-calendaring system, but cannot function without my Moleskine weekly notebook calendar. Pen and paper to-do lists forever!

What do you spend most of your time doing?

Meetings and emails.

What is a typical day like for you?

I am currently in a transition period from my previous role as the head of one of our branch libraries to a newly created communications position. Currently, my days are all about figuring out what the work should look like in the first year. I am also in the process of organizing the 2016 Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium with Emily Drabinski and Tara Robertson, and editing The Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership with Shirley Lew. Spending time and energy in critical librarianship helps me make sense of my work.

What are you reading right now?

Reading Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and re-reading The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali. Up next is The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.

What's the best professional advice you've ever received?

“Say what you really think. Don’t try to guess what people want to hear. You won’t get it right and it will be exhausting.” This advice was given to me by one of my first managers about answering interview questions, but it has informed much of my practice.

What have you found yourself doing at work that you never expected?

Pondering and not quite knowing what to do about our profession’s “diversity problem” especially with regards to race, ethnicity, and class. It’s not accurate to say I didn’t expect it at all, but it’s been surprising and tiresome to discover its ubiquity.

Inside the Library Studio

What is your favorite word?

Sodade.

What is your least favorite word?

Moderation.

What profession other than your own would you love to attempt?

I sold books for a decade before going to library school and still dream about running my own bookshop. Cheesemonger and winemaker are also high on the list.

What profession would you never want to attempt?

Soldier.

Everything Else

What superpower do you wish you had?

Cat whisperer.

What are you most proud of in your career?

Relationships built and maintained across the many jobs, libraries, and projects. 

If you're willing to share, tell about a mistake you made on the job.

Committing acts of impatience is a mistake I’ve made and continue to make. What this can end up looking like is getting started on a project without a comprehensive consultation or a fully realized plan.

When you aren't at work, what are you likely doing?

Wandering around Vancouver’s West End and Stanley Park, engaged in eating and drinking related activities, reading, procrastinating.

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Annette DeFaveri


Baharak Yousefi is on Twitter as @BaharakY.

Emotional Labor & Mental Health in the Library

This post is part of LIS Mental Health Week 2016, an event that is being organized by Cecily Walker and Kelly McElroy. Feel free to join the conversation in the comments here, on Twitter (using the hashtag #lismentalhealth), or in any of the other ways suggested in the post I linked at the beginning of this paragraph.

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I know I've touched on the idea of emotional labor on here in the past, but I wanted to talk about it in more detail for this post. The first thing you need to know about it is that emotional labor is exactly what it sounds like: it is work that involves your emotions. We're talking about putting a smile on your face and keeping it there whether you're happy or not. It's about showing a pre-approved range of emotions while working with patrons/customers/students. There are times when being in a good mood publicly is easy enough, but there are also times when it's really REALLY hard work. More important, though, is that for a lot of people in higher ed and in libraries, this is 100% of their job.

This concept was identified a long while ago, and has even been discussed in light of libraries and higher ed for decades, but I first encountered the idea early last year. That first article (I have to admit I can't remember which was the first. I've read so many since then.) was like a cool breeze. Suddenly things made sense! How I could sit all day and still be exhausted made sense. I was glad to have the science to describe something I'd known for a long time: working with the public is exhausting for reasons beyond the physical.

After I recovered from that immense sense of relief, I starting thinking about my staff. People who staff our circulation desk have duties beyond that service point, but that service point is still the primary job of every library associate. Good service is crucial in any library, but with our large proportion of first generation college students and our need to make our community as comfortable as possible, it's the top priority at my library. And all of this means that emotional labor is central to the job our library associates do.

Because it is central to their job, I need to support my staff as much as I can. I have instituted a required professional development policy - everyone must spend at least an hour each week, undisturbed and on the clock, learning. But I leave the topic up to them. Self-paced learning on a topic of their own choosing is part of the support, but more important still is the guaranteed time away from the public eye.

Emotional labor is no doubt hard work, but I think it's hard because it's so necessary. And since it's so necessary, I - as the boss - need to support the people doing the hard work. I - as the boss - need to support the mental health of my staff. This is just a small thing I've started doing, but I know I need to do more. I need to develop a safety valve for when things aren't smooth: a method for staff to experience emotions that aren't in line with those pre-approved emotions I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

My support of staff mental health is definitely a work in progress, but I wanted to share what I've done so far. I hope it inspires other administrators to institute similar programs for similar reasons.

Public Services Skills and the Technical Services Librarian: A Post-MLS Primer, by Catherine Oliver

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I was a cataloger from the word go. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed my reference sources and services class, but I felt out of place. Reference and I, I figured, had no chemistry. Cataloging, on the other hand, was fascinating. The poet Joseph Brodsky frequently compares translating a poem to solving a crossword puzzle whose answers wouldn’t be printed the next day; for me, cataloging was like solving a crossword puzzle whose answers would make people’s lives better- and getting paid to solve it (ideally). I was hooked!

All this is to say that, like many librarians, I chose a camp in library school and figured I’d carry its banner through to the end of my career. But library life is never that simple. Most of the cataloging and metadata job ad descriptions I saw, whether academic or public, stipulated that reference and/or instruction responsibilities would be part of the job. And as I began working in the library field, I saw the wisdom of these requirements. Getting to know users and their needs does help catalogers do their jobs better, and there are few surer ways to do that than by working with the public directly.

When I finally got my first professional position, I knew that a certain amount of public service work would be part of the job, and I knew that was a good thing. However, I also remembered how out of place I’d felt in that reference class years ago. What could I, as a tech-services librarian, bring to the table? How could I stop seeing myself as a second-rate reference librarian and utilize my cataloging skills to help patrons in my own way?

Here are some of the thoughts I’ve come up with along the way. I hope they’re of value to other tech-services librarians who are wondering how to become valuable 700 $e contributors to their libraries’ public services:

• We, as tech-services librarians, are skilled natural language to controlled vocabulary translators.

If you catalog for a living, you spend a lot of your time figuring out how to transform your own thoughts about a resource into the preferred terms allowed you by whichever controlled vocabulary you happen to be using. This gives you a significant advantage when you help a patron search in our catalog or in any kind of database. Not only can you translate patron queries into terms the database can understand, you can help patrons develop their own translation skills by encouraging them to think of searches in terms of nouns rather than phrases, to reflect on their needs and select the most specific terms possible, and, if that doesn’t work, to use the database’s cross-reference functionalities to play around with ideas rather than giving up.

• We know our metadata standards.

I don’t want to get into the debate on the merits of MARC and RDA. Regardless, we know what uniform titles are, and how they can be useful. We know- and depending on the OPAC, we may know more than the catalog can display- how the 780 and 785 fields show the soap-operatic lives, loves, offspring, and deaths of serials and what that means for a patron seeking a particular issue of The Atlantic Monthly. We can show you exactly what the relator terms signify. In other words, we can open the record to patrons in a way no interface can.

• The joy of browsing is ours to share with others.

The work of classification and subdivision assignment is done to allow patrons to browse, whether physically in the stacks or virtually by scrolling down a screen. We can use reference and instruction to show patrons how books are arranged on the shelf to allow for serendipitous discovery and demonstrate how perusing a list of subdivisions can be the key to finding just the right resource. We can also guide patrons to collections that might not be obvious, such as government documents or the bibliographies located in Z.

So remember that we, as tech-services librarians, have a lot to offer our patrons. And if all else fails, feel free to borrow my own pre-instruction session homily: “Suddenly, Last Summer was not a documentary; they won’t eat you.”

Catherine Oliver considered becoming a sheep shearer, a lyric soprano, and a sociolinguist before finally finding her niche as a cataloger, a career that combines elements of all three. Don’t ask about her novel unless you really want to know. She lives in Marquette, Michigan and is Cataloging and Metadata Services Librarian and Assistant Professor of Academic Information Services at Northern Michigan University. She tweets @marccold. [Editor's note: you really should follow her there. HIGHlarity always ensues.]

On Being Part of the Solution, Not the Problem

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You know those moments when two separate ideas converge and become one, and that one idea feels so right that you're unsure how you never thought of it before? Well, that happened to me recently. The first idea came from a blog post that Jenica Rogers wrote a couple of months ago, “harm created not out of malice but habit”. It's a short post, so I recommend you read it in its entirety. As for me, the crucial part is in the title of the post. It's from a quote about how so many colleges have problems with students actually graduating, especially students whose lives are so different from our own. I've long had a certainty that for some of the students who attend my institution, we are doing as much if not more harm than good by forgetting they are not us at that age.

The second idea is from a particular document with which I (and a lot of us in academic libraries) work on a regular basis: "Standards for Libraries in Higher Education." I've had to revisit some ideas from our multi-year assessment plan because of personnel changes in other departments, and one of the recurring themes from that document is the need to demonstrate our value to our communities and supporting the mission and needs of our students, faculty, and staff. And I know the best way to communicate is to make it a conversation. I need to follow Roger's example and start some conversations.

I already have a relationship with our Student Government Association, and I'm lucky in that I have an assigned liaison each year with whom I have a good relationship. But I need to push this further. I need to dig deeper and do better with communicating. Also with listening. I don't know if it's true this academic year, but I know we were designated a "minority serving institution" in the past - that means that 50+% of our student population are members of racial minorities. That's why what Rogers wrote resonated so strongly for me.

I need to noodle on this a while longer, but I need to reach out and I need to stretch myself. We need to do the best we can for our students, and then we need to do better than that.

How about you? What are you doing to serve your community better?

Just for Fun: A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

I've loved Star Wars as long as I can remember. Playing the soundtrack of A New Hope and acting out the scenes was a required activity whenever my cousin came to visit. I always got to play Leia, and I have clear memories of trying to escape Darth Vader by hiding behind my father's La-Z-Boy recliner.

I saw The Force Awakens opening weekend and I'm still having a hard time articulating exactly why I loved it so much. Instead, here are some of the things that I love about the entire series.

The Music
That soundtrack I mentioned up above, the one that accompanied Josh's and my childhood games...? I own that original vinyl that my parents played for us. Besides, how much better does it get than the John Williams' music?



Chewbacca
I love Chewbacca. Deeply. Another thing I own that some would call "vintage" but which I would call "a relic of my childhood" is a stuffed Chewbacca. I lost his bandolier somewhere along the way, but I've never lost Chewie. Last December, which was the last time I watched the original trilogy, I pulled out my stuffie Chewie but was too slow. The dearly departed Holly claimed him before I got a chance.

The Memes
There are so very many good ones that I think it's easier to link to an image search, but my favorite (that I have on a t-shirt I wear semi-regularly) is below.

So, how about you? What's your favorite thing about Star Wars?

2016? Already?

Easing myself back into the swing of everything libr* in my life, my professional commitments and responsibilities both on and off my campus. I have been working on a couple of posts - one sharing my thoughts about something Jenica Rogers wrote towards the end of last year (about better serving minority students) and another about how I manage to achieve my particular brand of theoretical eclecticism - but neither are to the point where I'm ready to share.

I started to beat myself up for it, but then I remembered I'm fighting whatever is going around my building right now (everybody but me seems to have been sick over break). I also remembered the one change I'm going to make this year, besides reading more books I already own, is to be kinder to myself. Further, not only am I trying to be kinder to myself, I'm trying to really mean it.

This dog is how it felt when I was being kind to myself in the past:

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This is how I want it to feel:

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So here it is, 2016. Kindness, both to ourselves and to others, needs to be everyone's resolution. And I'm practicing what I preach.