Working with your CIO and IT, by Holly Heller-Ross

Note: This post is adapted from a talk that the author gave and the blog owner attended.

My career in libraries has taken me from a public, to a hospital, and now to an academic library. Along the way, I’ve picked up some experience working with information technology (IT) and currently serve as both Library Director and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a medium-sized public higher education institution - SUNY Plattsburgh.

The working relationship between library and IT at a higher ed institution can have a profound impact on the success of a library, so here are my thoughts on how to build and sustain one that is positive and productive.

First, recognize the CIO as a kindred soul with the same pressures library directors face. That will help break down any initial us vs. them thinking. Staffing, budget and time limitations, concerns about effective leadership strategies, the need to prove value and measure impact, insufficient space, inflationary expense increases well above any increases in higher education funding …all these things library directors face? Yeah, CIO’s face also and on a campus-wide scale!

Just take service hours as an example. For the library director students are always asking for 24/7 open hours, and most libraries are not staffed or budgeted to provide that. And then there’s the question of when to put your top performers or most skilled staff on the front lines? Should your librarians be teaching or developing online guides, or both, but in what proportion? Now imagine the CIO, who is asked to provide network, helpdesk, telecom, and information security coverage…also without the staff or budget to really provide that. Also wondering whether to task the software trainer with group workshops or one-on-one faculty conferences? Surely that’s something to bond over with a cup of coffee or tea! [Editor’s Note: Or a nice imperial stout?]

I’m not suggesting the only commonalities are ones of insufficiency though. The joys of problem solving, assisting faculty with teaching and scholarship, measuring impact on student learning and showing positive correlations, getting a great purchasing deal with a vendor, and mentoring staff through career pathways you’ve helped create are some commonalities you and the CIO can celebrate together.

Second, appreciate their goals and tell them about yours. One good way to keep up on IT goals is to read the EDUCAUSE “Top 10 IT Issues” annual article. This will provide both a listing and some good contextual material for general understanding of IT priorities. Once you have the basics, start to match your library top issues with the IT issues your CIO is likely to already be thinking about.

Like in any relationship, shared values and objectives make all the work and effort easier to align. Information Security for example, has been a Top 10 IT issue for quite a while, and will likely remain so. It might be time to engage in an Information Security Review of library resources, including database access, patron record storage and security, login protocols, off-campus and proxy access, and library web pages. Any improvements here will be gains for the library and for IT. Other possibilities for common goals include improvements to login-times and quick print, switching from custom quoted staff desktops to standardized purchases and images, assignment of off-campus proxy admin rights to a technology minded librarian, and collaborative training of student employees for efficiency. I’m sure you’ll think of specifics for your library, it just takes a bit of effort.

Then, share your library goals with the CIO or other IT staff. Feel free to share ALA and ACRL reports and white papers, your own assessment results, and your own strategic plans with the CIO and others.  Executive summaries will certainly be welcome, but some folks will want the whole thing, and as librarians, we can be ready to provide that at the drop of a hat!

Third, be clear about your priorities and their impact on students and faculty. Clarity enables boldness, as the inspirational posters read! Once you have established your priorities, make sure all your campus partners know what they are. 

Whether your priorities are facilities upgrades, green initiatives, patron or staff technology upgrades, improved technology support, library service enhancements for the teaching and learning environments, mobile technology improvements, or anything else, make sure people know what you care the most about.

Remember that your priorities are more likely to get attention when they fit in with an overall campus goal, and that timing matters! Like all of higher education, library impact on faculty teaching and scholarship, student learning and success, and institutional efficiencies, are what matters now. During the span of my career, higher education has shifted from input measures, to output measures, to impact metrics.  If your institution is focused on improving the learning environment and fostering student engagement and retention for example, my advice would be to also focus on that for your library. Let the other initiatives wait. Get in sync with your institution and that will make it much easier to get support from your CIO and all your other campus partners.

Fourth, keep the communication channels open and flowing at all levels of your organization. You probably already know how the library and IT intersect in the formal communication channels such as reporting, leadership teams, and organizational committees. Is this enough? Map it out and you’ll be able to see where there are gaps in substance or in timeliness. If there is an important committee that meets only once a semester, look for ways to supplement that information exchange with email updates or some other activity.

Then, dig a bit deeper to look for both informal communication channels as well as sub population channels that could be enhanced.  Do you have vertical and diagonal communication channels? Can you arrange for other affinity groups to collaborate and communicate? For instance, could you and the CIO put a group of recent hires together for a specific task? If you could, not only would you get a specific task accomplished, but you’d start to build the next generation of collaborative colleagues. Do you have group and one-on-one communication channels open and functioning? A greater variety of channels will yield a greater variety of information flow, and that’s exactly what you want! 

And finally, if things go wrong, don’t get mad… get curious! That’s not just good personal relationship building advice; it’s good for the workplace too!

Holly Heller-Ross is the Dean of Library and Information Technology Services, and CIO, at SUNY Plattsburgh.

Shame and Reading: Some Thoughts on Popular Reading Materials

I've been thinking a lot about shame and reading lately. I had a conversation recently in which I started to feel a little ashamed of my reading habits, and realized I shouldn't. (This wasn't because of anything the other person said or did. Just fighting habits of years feeling like I was supposed to read "important" literature.) Feeling ashamed can transfer in so many ways, both personally and professionally. Sure, I am the director of library services at a community college that serves 4 different counties, have a deep and wide intellect and curiosity for learning, and seem to have an addiction to attaining advanced degrees. But I'm also a human being who lives in this culture that seems designed to degrade and depress (capitalism is the worst). Why shouldn't I read fun things?

Here are some books that I'm either currently reading or have finished recently (meaning within the last few weeks):

• Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs. It's in the middle of two intertwined series - "Alpha and Omega" and "Mercy Thompson" - which are these wonderfully written books set in a world with werewolves and vampires and fae and magic, but with politics and history that is ostensibly the same as the United States in which I live. Reading these books is like slipping into a warm bath. They aren't particularly page-turner-y, with suspense and intrigue, but they are comfortable and soothing.
• Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. Oh, how I love the "Discworld" series. These books are expertly written parodies of sword & sorcery that still stay true to the tropes and functions of the genre it parodies. This one in particular made fun of Hollywood and popular culture. And I loved it.
• The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner. Part biography, part history of science (evolution), part science, and all rivetingly interesting. Everything from Darwin to a discussion of the arms race going on between bacteria and the makers of antibiotics.
• Kindred by Octavia Butler. An African-American woman keeps getting pulled back to pre-Civil War Maryland to save a white ancestor of hers. Engrossing commentary on race and politics and capitalism and gender and a bazillion other concepts.

As you can see, my reading ranges from works that are more ephemeral and fluffy to books that some consider part of the American canon. What's more - I checked every single one of these out from a library, which is as it should be. And for those of you who work at public libraries, you're likely nodding your head and thinking, "Of course! How is this even a question? Why are you even writing about it, Jessica?" I'm not really talking to you. 

I'm talking, instead, to the academic libraries that are still holding out from buying popular reading materials. First of all, it is an entirely defensible expense: People are writing academic discourse on Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy and Amy Tan and a bazillion other so called popular authors. In the past, Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Horatio Alger were all popular authors who have been studied again and again in the intervening years. I'm sure you have a popular culture scholar or two on your campus who would add their voice to your argument. Second, even if you are down the street from a public library (which is somewhat rare), why are you passing responsibility ignoring the needs and wants of your community? Third, the ability to sustain attention reading is a transferable skill. 

In my life before academia, I worked in a book store, and I'll never forget a conversation I had with a regular customer. I was talking about some piece of fluff I'd read recently, and then I berated myself for not reading "good" books more often. Her response was, "a 'good' book is the one you enjoy."

I know that we in academic libraries are supposed to support the scholarly record and the curriculum and the research needs of our communities, but shouldn't we also support the other needs of our patrons? Why are we shaming them about their interests in reading by leaving fun books out of our collections? Even if we aren't shaming them on purpose, it is still shaming. Besides, if we're trying to get people to value the library, shouldn't we be providing materials we know they will appreciate? Buy some good books.

Questions to Ask When Eyeing The Captain's Chair

A friend of mine has become a prime target for headhunters looking for library director candidates, and so wrote to ask for advice. They aren't sure if they want to sit in the captain's chair just yet, but it's a possibility. So they wrote to me, asking for my opinion about questions to ask and red flags they should watch for when interviewing for library director positions. That friend is in academia, like me, so that's the bias of this blog post. If there's enough interest, I'll happily seek out a public library director to write a similar post.

1. Do your research on the institution. I like GlassDoor.com, but if it's a small enough school they might not have a lot of ratings so also consider asking friends you trust if they know anyone who works there.
2. Comb their website like crazy and learn everything you can about them. Especially look for their Clery report and for the things they don't say (like student/faculty ratio).
3. See if AAUP has said anything, good or bad, about them. It's especially important to look if they've been censured.
4. Also look to see how they are doing with their accreditation(s). Different regions report to different bodies - and the US Department of Education has a still decent website to determine who covers where. But you'll also want to look deeper, especially at professional programs. The American Bar Association visited my campus recently to look at our paralegal program.
5. There's a big, neon warning that I ignored in the past: I didn't listen to my gut. I knew the place was bad, but I let my excitement about a move up get in the way of listening to my instincts.
6. Make sure to ask all the normal interview questions like, "How will I know if I'm successful after the first year?" and, "What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the successful candidate?" but also pay attention to the questions they ask you. I've learned you can hear what they didn't like about the director who left if you think about their questions for a second. Example, "How do you institute change? How do you make your decisions about what to change?" can be code, depending on their tone, for, "We want someone who isn't going to change anything" or, "I hate it here and want you to change everything."
7. The adverts are also going to be telling. How long is the ad? Super short is just as worrying as super long. Also, are they looking for the mythical unicorn? 
8. Ask about the budget. How big it is and how decisions are made about what gets spent. Be sure to save this question for the appropriate person - the provost or whoever is the boss of the library director. If they won't tell you numbers, whoa that's a bad sign.
9. Finally, look around you. Look at the people - is the group diverse, or pretty uniform? Look at the students - do you see a lot of them in the library? Do they seem happy? Look at the infrastructure - are the buildings in good repair? Is there decent parking? 

I know I'm forgetting something, but these questions and this approach helped me so very much with my most recent job search. In the past, if I'd taken the time to listen, I'd've heard the robot from Lost in Space warning me - "Danger, Jessica Olin! Danger!" But now? Now I feel like I get to ride a fire-breathing unicorn pretty much every day at work.

For those of you who are also in some sort of administrative position in libraries, what did I miss?

Getting Up To Speed: First Month in My New Job

My first month in the new job is over, and I feel really good about my progress. I've had a one-on-one meeting with every single person who works for me (16 people!) at least once, and most of them I've sat down with more than that. If you'll remember from the last post I wrote about my new gig, I'm working to learn the People, Process, and Projects. As a way to get to know my people, I asked everybody the exact same questions to start with. Thought I'd share them along with some of my reason for asking each question.


Personal & Professional Questions (these were mostly about breaking the ice and getting to know each other):

1. How long have you worked at this school?
2. How long in your current role? (Lots of promotion from within.)
3. Are you from the area? If not, where are you from originally?
4. What’s your favorite local restaurant? (Purely selfish on my part!)
5. How often do you want to hear from me as a group? (Gave me an opportunity to learn about my predecessor's style while also talking about my communication style. Also talked about meetings vs. emails.)
6. How often do you want to meet with me?

College & Library Questions (They've worked here a lot longer than I have and know the institution better. Also, this gave me an opportunity to figure out staff fears and hopes):

1. What are the biggest challenges the organization* is facing (or will face in the near future)
2. Why is the organization* facing (or going to face) these challenges?
3. What are the most promising opportunities**?
4. What would need to happen for us to follow up on these opportunities**?
5. If you were me, on what would you focus your attention?

*In this context, organization can mean everything from your particular part of the library all the way up to GCC in general, but I’m more interested in at the library level or below.

**Here, “opportunities” means anything that could enhance student, faculty, or staff experiences in and with the library. This could include things that would make your job easier or smoother.


I've also had follow up meetings with a good chunk of the staff about their specific job duties, college policies and procedures, and the my questions from walking around and reading as much as I've been able to read so far.

I still have more questions than answers. I still have so much more to learn. Truth is, though, that my learning will be a never-ending story. I was still learning things about my last job up until the very end. But getting past the steepest part of the learning curve is, and will be for the foreseeable future, my top priority.

How I Interview

We're getting ready to do another round of hiring for a library associate position (works at the circulation desk with other assigned projects), so I'm revisiting how I've hired in the past. One thing I'll never change is that I don't look at an applicant's name until I've looked at their resume - it's one way I've found to fight unconscious bias against names that don't sound Caucasian. Another thing I'll never change is to have someone besides me (aka the boss) give candidates a tour of the building. But, as much as I like the questions we've asked in the past, I'm considering changing them up. Below is a list of the questions along with a brief explanation of why we ask them:

1. Can you tell me why you’re interested? I'm pretty sure we've asked this because everyone asks this. I think I'm going to cut it, actually.
2. How do you handle a bad customer service interaction? (Give example.) Students, faculty, and staff don't always act their best when they are stressed, and the person working at the front desk is the front line. I need to know that they aren't going to take it personally when people get angry.
3. When you use libraries, how do you use them? To be honest, this is more of an intro to something I want all candidates to know - that this library is an academic department and a physical location and that we do plenty of things that are traditionally seen as student life. I want to give them a head's up about the things that aren't necessarily in the job description.
4. How do you like to learn new work skills? We give preference to people who have either experience in a library or in a public facing role in higher ed, but regardless of what they bring to the job - there's a lot of learning for them. We need to know how to tailor what we teach to how they learn.
5. How do you handle projects you’ve been given? This is a way to get at how they approach things when they aren't supervised. 
6. Tell me about a previous job — what did you love and what didn’t you like? This is another question we ask as a way to introduce a topic I want to discuss, namely my management style. 
7. How do you respond when you don’t know the answer to a question? We need people who are willing to admit they don't know everything and know how to handle that.
8. What is good customer service? We're looking for people to talk about respect. Most of our students are first generation college students, so making sure our students feel comfortable coming in the building is important.
9. How would you handle it if the phone rang right as a line formed at the circulation desk? Trying to figure out how they handle stressful situations - hypotheticals are good for that.
10. How do you handle it when you disagree with coworkers? How about with a boss? This is important information, but yet again it's an opportunity to talk to them about my management style - about how I want people to let me know when I've made a mistake.
11. What questions do you have for me? You can learn so much about a person by the kinds of questions they ask.

What do you all think? Anything you'd change? (Feel free to borrow these questions if you like them.)

How I Do Reference Interviews

13+ years out from my MLIS graduation, a lot of memories about my time at Simmons have started to fade. However, one thing is still very clear: learning how to conduct a reference interview. Our professor (and our textbook) made a big deal of how it isn't the librarian's business why a patron needs this information, and I took that "don't ask why they are asking" admonition very much to heart... for about a month after I started working in an academic library. Don't get me wrong: I still respect my patrons' right to privacy, but making sure they can fulfill the professor's requirements is also a big part of my job. As a result, I've tweaked my reference interview tactics. I don't hit every one of these with every student, but hopefully you'll understand my thinking after you read through this list.

1. "If you don't mind my asking, is this for an assignment?" If they tell me it's not, I revert immediately back to the method I was taught in graduate school. If they tell me it is for an assignment...
2. "Do you have the assignment with you? It would help me to help you if I could see it." The student who was supposed to pick any painter from the Romantic period but who asked for information about a Renaissance painter? Or that other student who insisted they weren't allowed to use internet sources when really they weren't allowed to use web sources? Saved both of them a lot of time and heartache.
3. "When is this due?" This lets me know if we have time for interlibrary loan, or to request things from other libraries in the consortium, or if we only have time to look at resources that are available right away.
4. "Where have you looked? And it's totally cool if you haven't looked anywhere; I'm just trying to figure out where to start." Yes, I say that whole thing. Sometimes students get so overwhelmed that they can't even talk about their topic clearly, and I don't want them to feel bad about that. If a student has gotten to the point where they're willing to come to a librarian for help, I want them to feel good about it. However, if they have looked somewhere and had no luck, I can sometimes help immediately by pointing them to a different database or even sometimes a reference book.
5. "Can you tell me why you picked this topic?" Here's where I'm fishing for search terms. Sure, there are the assignments I've seen so many times before that I know the right words from the get-go, but there are plenty of times when someone working on a senior capstone project introduces me to a brand new topic. And though I know plenty of good search phrases in the disciplines on my campus, I am always learning.
6. "Do you feel comfortable working on this on your own? Do you have enough direction to get started?" I don't typically ask this until I'm fairly certain they'll say they are fine, but I still ask it so they can hear it themselves.
7. "If you need any more help, [how to find me and how long I'll be available]. And good luck with your assignment." I also go back, about 5 to 10 minutes later, to see if everything is still going smoothly. It's about making sure that the student has the tools they need.

So there it is: my process for conducting reference interviews at an academic library. Other academics, did I leave anything out that you usually do? 

I Stand With Faculty at LIU Brooklyn #LIUlockout

Rather than me telling you how to do some part of your job better, or how I learned to do my job better, I'm going to ask you to spread the word about what is currently happening and support the faculty of Long Island University, Brooklyn.

Here's an excerpt from the Long Island University Faculty Federations' press release:

Long Island University informed the LIU Faculty Federation (LIUFF) that it plans to lock out faculty at midnight on Friday, September 2, on the eve of a no confidence vote in President Kimberly L Cline. The faculty contract expired on August 31. Picketing to protest the lockout and use of replacement workers will take place on Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues at 10 a.m., Wednesday, September 7, the first day of classes. The LIU Faculty Federation/NYSUT/AFT represents fulltime and adjunct faculty.

That lock out happened. Many are calling this action on the part of the administration at LIU Brooklyn "unprecedented." It is, without a doubt, unmerited and unethical.

So what can you do? You can send a letter to the administration via actionnetwork.org, demanding that the lockout end immediately. You can also send email directly to the president of LIU Brooklyn: Kim.Cline@liu.edu. But most importantly, you can pay attention to what is happening by following the hashtag #LIUlockout on Twitter - you don't need an account to read the tweets.

And if you already have a Twitter account, follow Emily Drabinski there. She's the secretary of the union. She wrote that press release and is keeping the community up to date via her Twitter:

"Replacement workers" are receiving a $50/day commute stipend. This is not about money. This is about power. #LIUlockout

— Emily Drabinski (@edrabinski) September 6, 2016

Innovation and Deep Pockets

I read an article last week that had me steaming by the time I was halfway through it. The article could be boiled down to one idea: academic libraries should look to public libraries for inspiration so we don't become relics. The author went on to point out what a lot of big schools (and just big schools) have been doing in this vein.

Me, after reading this article. (source)

I'm not going to name names, because this isn't the first (or second, or twentieth) time I've seen this phenomenon. "Look at this cool new thing," from someone at a big school is inevitably something either I or a colleague at another small school, or both, have been doing for a decade. And I'm getting tired of it. So tired that I had a mini Twitter rant after reading it:

original rant here

Let me toot my own horn for a bit here and tell you about things I've done that were inspired in part or in whole by public libraries:

• Graphic novel collections (built two on my own and am building a third with help from my staff right now) and other popular reading materials collections;
• Live action role playing gaming in the library; 
• Therapy dogs for comfort during final exams;
• A circulating board game collection (I haven't written a post about this yet, but I should.).

One other thing that I've done that I consider innovative was a cultural literacy talk series which featured topics like the biblical/literary/scientific origins of modern zombies and perspectives on abortion as seen through teen movies.

Further, I'm not the only librarian at a small academic library who is doing these kinds of things. Not by a lot. Graphic novel collections are widespread now, and board games collections are gaining traction. I've seen maker spaces in academic libraries. Arts & crafts nights. Dance parties. Video game tournaments. I could go on and on, but I won't.

Even all of that wouldn't bother me, though, if not for the cherry on the poop sundae of this phenomenon. The thing that bothers me the most is that people think I have no imagination because I can't spend a lot of money on things. Or, as Barbara Fister put it (so much better than I ever could):

@mjecclestone @olinj @jacobsberg There's a lot of privilege in libraryland that confuses under-resourced with being not visionary enough

— (((barbara fister))) (@bfister) June 14, 2016

Other small academic library people, share some things you've done in the comments!

Popular Culture in the Academic Library: Community Building

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When I was a fresh out of grad school librarian, I didn't realize that embracing popular culture things - I use "things" for lack of a better umbrella term - as outreach and community building was in anyway abnormal. 13+ years into my career, I know it was very unusual back then and is still sadly uncommon now. Here are some of the things I currently embrace and/or have embraced in the past:

1. Gaming events in the library. In the past I've hosted Humans vs. Zombies, a Super Smash Brothers tournament, and board game events at more than one library. The video game tournament wasn't as successful for relationship building, but every single other event I've listed was a huge success for the library. We got to know the students/faculty/staff of the school and they got to know us.
2. Graphic novel collections. My first library job in higher ed was at a college that specifically worked with students who have learning differences (ADHD/dyslexia/etc.). For so many of those students, and students I've worked with since, the library represented what they couldn't do well. Sequential art, on the other hand, uses different parts of the brain for processing than what we use for reading just words. My first graphic novel collection was a way to reach out to students and to get them in the library. It worked so well that I've created similar collections everywhere else I've worked.
3. Popular press fiction and nonfiction collections. I've been lucky to work with a lot of popular culture scholars in my library career. From the biomedical humanities professor who studied film to the Cormac McCarthy scholar and beyond, I was responsible for collecting works of and about popular appeal "things." That's the traditional reason for academic libraries to have such collections. But I saw the crossover appeal to pleasure reading/viewing/etc. in those collections at a school with no other source of books/movies/etc. in walking distance. 
4. Service to consortia. Two of my three library jobs in higher ed were at libraries that participated in large consortia: OhioLINK and Delaware Libraries. Smaller schools are typically net borrowers, so having popular music or movies or books can help even out the imbalance.
5. Board game collections. This is my most recent endeavor, and it's still fairly unusual for an academic library to have a circulating board game collection, but it's one of my favorite things I've done. It started out purely as an outreach maneuver. We have a group on campus called "Campus of the Nerds," and I was seeing them in the library a lot anyway. Creating the board game collection was a way to support a new student club, but it's also been a great tool for getting to know faculty and staff and other students. We've even gotten suggestions for board games to add, and getting any kind of request from our community is rare even when we solicit requests.

I know I've beaten this particular drum before, but it's a big thing for me. Community building is key to all libraries, and it's not just about the services we provide. Academic libraries of all makes and models could easily add these kinds of collections and this kind of outreach. You know what? Let me fix that sentence: all libraries should embrace these kinds of collections and outreach.

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?

Letter to a Young Alt-Ac Librarian: Yes, We’re Out There!, by Laura Braunstein

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Note: While I had been working on a guest post to send Jessica for some time, I was inspired to respond to a recent post from Abigail Phillips, who wrote, “Librarians with PhDs have so much to offer the practitioner world of librarianship. We just have to figure out how to promote our degree as an advantage not a disadvantage. It sounds weird to say that having a doctorate opens a lot of doors, because it closes almost as many. I wonder if there are other LIS PhDers like me out there.”

For many young librarians — young at heart, if not young in years — librarianship is a career change. Pursuing a library career may come after years committed to academia — perhaps the young librarian has completed a master’s or PhD, and has heard about or experienced too much misery on the dismal job market to invest a single additional second looking for a tenure-track faculty position. That’s what happened to me shortly after the beginning of this century.

Flash back nearly fifteen years: I finished my doctorate in Victorian literature and, after years as a student, I was burned out. I had taken an interesting job with a scholarly non-profit, but I wanted to be back on a university campus. One day I stumbled upon a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Todd Gilman, then as now the English librarian at Yale. In a series of posts, Todd extolled the benefits and challenges of librarianship for PhDs who were looking for a career change. This was a revelation — I wanted to work in higher education, but not as a professor. I wanted to teach, but not to grade. I wanted to work with information, knowledge, and research — but also with people. Within hours of reading Todd’s column, I signed up for an open house at a library science program that was tailored to the schedules of working professionals. In a year and a half, I finished my master’s degree (I was privileged, in a sense, to have had a decent credit rating and to qualify for loans that I’m still paying off.). After a reasonably challenging but not disheartening job search, I began working as a librarian in a position where I support and engage with teaching, learning, and research. 

What has changed since then for recent PhDs who are interested in librarianship? What is now known as the alt-ac (for “alternative academic”) movement has reared its desperately needed head. While PhDs in the sciences have always had non-academic opportunities, faculty are now more willing to advise doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences regarding alternative careers, and to direct students to campus resources for “versatile PhDs.” These days, many LIS programs are now wholly or partly online, opening access to far more potential students.

So, if you’re a recently minted PhD, ABD, or MA, and you’ve decided to pivot over to librarianship, what should you do?

Informational interviewing. Ask the librarians you know (and I hope you know them if you’re in a PhD program) about their career paths. Find out how many different kinds of librarianship there are — something I didn’t know when I started. Your doctoral program activities may suggest a career path. Did you teach first-year writing? You may find many of your interests shared by information literacy programs. Did you do descriptive bibliography? You may want to be a cataloguer. Did you edit an open-access journal of graduate student scholarship? Look into being a scholarly communications librarian. Did you develop a digital humanities project? Many libraries are hiring not only DH librarians, but programmers and data visualizers. 

Research. You’re good at that. Find out what LIS programs are available in your area. Can you get credit for your PhD coursework? Are you eligible for scholarships from ALA or other professional organizations? Look into opportunities at your current university. Can you job-shadow, intern, or volunteer on a library project? Can you take a temporary or support staff position to learn more about how libraries work as organizations?

Read. You’re very good at that. Read articles in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, and C&RL News. If you’re here at Letters to a Young Librarian, you’ve already found a great source of advice, but there are many more blogs out there. A few of my favorites are Hack Library School, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, Library BabelFish, ACRLog, and Beerbrarian. 

Join and Socially Mediate. What was your specialty in graduate school? There is probably a branch of librarianship focusing on that subject, with its own professional community, including the ACRL Literatures in English Section, SALALM, and (the other) MLA. Many of these groups have their own Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, and provide formal and informal mentoring programs. Your state library association or ACRL chapter could provide networking and grant opportunities. Twitter is a great place to start library-career conversations; every Tuesday evening at 8pm EST is #libchat, and the #altac community is well represented.

Good luck in your career transition. We need you at the library.

Laura Braunstein is the Digital Humanities and English Librarian at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. Find her on Twitter at @laurabrarian.

My (Library) Life with Invisible Disabilities, by Jessica Schomberg

My first job in libraries was as a page in a public library. Shortly after I started, a librarian tried to have me fired because I have diabetes. This isn’t speculation, this was the actual reason given. And while this occurred after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, it was well before the passage of the 2008 Amendments, which explicitly covers people like me, who can mitigate our condition with medication. Fortunately for me, the library director had been diagnosed with diabetes the week before, or my life story might have gone in a very different direction.

(Are you wondering, dear reader, whether I got diabetes because I’m an “innocent victim” or because I “deserved it”? You’re not the first. Keep reading.)

This blog post was prompted by several things. By Ta-Nehisi Coates’s  Between the World and Me, which presents an embodied view of discrimination. By a blog post by Netanel Ganin (@OpOpinions) in which he talks about disabilities as a social construct rather than a medical one, a post which has caused me to completely rethink who I am in this world. But it was mostly due to Jessica Olin’s use of anime eyes in her call for blog posts. Who can resist anime eyes?

How do you cure a social ill? How do you define people with disabilities? How do you make libraries accessible to people with disabilities? I have struggled for a long time about whether or not to identify as disabled. By calling myself disabled, am I being disrespectful to my sister, who has very visible disabilities and whose economic and career prospects are impossibly constrained? I have a job that I enjoy: I can accumulate savings: I can “pass.” And after all, it’s only when my body doesn’t work “normally” that I feel disabled… or is it?

About a decade after I was not fired from my first library job, after receiving my shiny MLIS, I was looking for full-time library jobs (like you do). And one of the people who worked at one of the places I interviewed told me not to disclose my medical history or I wouldn’t be hired. Not because I wasn’t qualified (I was), not because I didn’t have a good performance record (I did), but because I occasionally need to take time to keep my body working in its ideal condition and that makes people uncomfortable.

(No, dear reader, I’m not going to name that library. Just imagine it’s where you work, because that’s close enough to the truth.)

Now, fast forward another decade, and I am employed in a satisfying career and now also supervise, mentor, or otherwise provide leadership to a team that includes other people with disabilities. Knowing what I know about living with my own disabilities, living in a world where I am/we are repeatedly identified as sub-optimal, what does that mean for me-as-leader? It means:

1. Recognizing that control is an illusion.
2. Recognizing that different people with disabilities are first and foremost different people. Not all people with disabilities are magically going to get along. Not all disabilities are the same. I try to go into conversations by asking what people need to succeed, what impediments they’re dealing with, and by discussing work expectations of ourselves and others. If someone doesn’t trust me enough to share that, I try to work with people they do trust to make sure they have the resources and support they need even if it’s not coming from me. To re-state: making sure that the people on my team have what they need to do their jobs is more important than being either rule-bound or being recognized as their rescuer.
3. Recognizing that many of us have swallowed the idea that productivity is more important than people. [Editor’s Note: Yes!] This sometimes means explicitly pointing out when work expectations are unreasonable, or harmful, or cause us to miss opportunities. If we’re not willing to examine how some of our practices exclude co-workers from full participation, how are we going to be mindful of our users? And vice versa.
4. Recognizing that I’ve swallowed the same delusions that non-disabled people have. From another angle, recognizing that I’m part of my team. My energy level varies greatly depending on what’s going on with my body or how untenable I’ve let my schedule become. I have spent decades trying to “pass” or “overcome” my disabilities. I’m not sure that the profession  would have let me in if I hadn’t done those things, but now that I’m in a leadership position I feel an obligation to call out that expectation. That means letting my coworkers who have emotional leadership skills do that work without feeling the need to be Mr./Ms./Mx. Amazing Perfect Leader. It also means allowing myself to take the breaks I need without beating myself up. Because I’ve internalized those messages about normality and productivity, this is sometimes incredibly hard for me. It is thanks to many kind, generous, and sensible library folk on Twitter that I’ve been able to make progress on this.
5. Resisting the urge to bop people on the nose when they say “everyone has a disability.” No. They don’t. I suck at math, but I haven’t been almost fired for sucking at math. I haven’t had to fight with insurance companies for the medicine that keeps me alive because I suck at math. I haven’t had to restrict my activities and monitor every aspect of my daily life because I suck at math. I have to do all that because my immune system killed my pancreas.

(We’re at the end, dear reader. And going back to the first question, I’m not a victim unless you make me one. And no one deserves diabetes, or any other type of chronic illness.)

For more on this topic, see Susan Wendell’s The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability.

Jessica Schomberg is currently serving as Library Services Department Chair at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where her other hats include Media Cataloger and Assessment Coordinator. She tweets as @schomj.