On Still Not Knowing Everything

Since I just closed out my first six months of my not-so-new-anymore job, I figured it was time to revisit the idea of knowing that I don't know - something I wrote about almost exactly 5 years ago as I was about to start my first job as a library administrator. My mind was boggling at all that I had to learn, and the truth is that I hadn't even imagined half of all that there was to know.

This most recent job change was easier in some ways. I made a lot of mistakes as a new library director... mostly dealing with people issues. Learning that I couldn't think aloud anymore was hard. Learning to ask questions in a way that the staff understood it really was just curiosity with no subtext was even harder. Hardest of all was learning to look at the entire context of an issue before trying to come up with a response. So starting my second job as an administrator was smoother because of all my past missteps, but that prior learning hasn't actually made it easy.

Although I'd worked at a two year institution before, I've never worked at a public institution of higher education. Further, although we are relatively small at just under 6000 FTE, this is also the biggest school that has ever employed me. Another big change is the size of the staff - I have 17 people working for me. I have learned a lot a lot a lot, but I'm still adjusting to all of this. And there is still so much more to learn.

Here's a list of what I KNOW I need to do:

• Experience all the ins and outs of our budget cycle;
• Sit down with as many of the rest of the faculty as possible;
• Live through the rest of our strategic planning process and experience its ramifications;
• Understand all of my responsibilities as they play out through the school year;
• Get to know all the nuanced (or not so nuanced) differences between working at a small liberal arts college and a small-ish community college.

And that's just the stuff I know that I need to learn. At least once a week I learn something that I had no idea I needed to know, like how we handle email when someone leaves the institution or who to contact when I want to reserve a room in one of our new buildings. We all know, in theory at least, that we never stop learning, but it's so very different to be living it every day of my life. I love it.

I Was Wrong, But I'm Trying to Learn

This is a thread of things I have been wrong about, or have argued in the past, but would no longer argue. I'm sure it will grow.

— Katherine Crocker (@cricketcrocker) March 6, 2017

The tweet up there is the beginning of a long-ish thread. Each tweet (I highly recommend reading it in its entirety) made me catch my breath. I have been wrong about so many of the same topics. I'm sure there are a lot of us who can identify. I was originally planning to write something about community building for today, but then I saw Crocker's thread and knew I had to write something similar for LtaYL.

So, here are some things about which I have been wrong, oh so very wrong wrongity wrong, with a focus on library-centric ideas.

It's my job to make libraries better for marginalized populations and people of color. Oh, the arrogance in that thought. It makes me cringe just reading it, but I really believed that a few years ago. The idea that I was a knight in shining armor, no matter how well intentioned, still centered my experience and my role in fighting racism in higher ed and in libraries. Further, it ignored the voices of people already in the room. Yes, I do need to fight racism and sexism and transphobia and other prejudices whenever and wherever I can, but one of the most important things I can do as a librarian - and as a library administrator - is to shut my mouth and listen.

If there is nothing in my library's collection that makes my skin crawl, then I'm not doing my job. I can't be a first amendment purist anymore. Sure, the first amendment doesn't strictly apply to the work I do since it discusses government restricting speech, and I've always worked at private institutions. The thing is, I still took it as my job to represent culture in all its various expressions on my shelves. No, we can't ignore the Nazis - either in the past or in our present - but I can no longer blithely buy the kinds of books that represent Holocaust Denier theories as fact. I now know I've given a platform to hate speech, and that bothers me more than I can ever explain. I know this may be a little confusing to read, so let me put it in concrete terms for you: this change in philosophy is why I bought Glenn Beck in the past but refuse to buy Milo Yiannopoulos now.

Diversity initiatives are the answer. This is another complicated mess of an idea, but the core of why it is problematic is that the initiatives are just the beginning. In fact, Harvard Business Review has written about how diversity programs fail. Inclusion and acceptance are not the same thing. By putting all our emphasis on creating diversity, we end up working hard to get people on campus or in the library without considering making people feel welcome and heard and part of the conversation once they arrive. Even more, we need to stop putting the onus on the people around us who are members of one or more minority groups. I was raised Jewish and I'm a practicing Buddhist, and have repeatedly been expected to be the voice of "my people" in professional circumstances, so you'd think with my experiences I'd have grasped this sooner. However, my conditional whiteness (I'm in a minority but I don't read that way at a glance) has made things smoother for me. And one of my favorite definitions of privilege is that the biggest benefit you gain is the ability to be blind to the benefits it affords you.

Back to the thread that got me thinking in this way:

So. Hi. I'm Katherine. I'm superflawed & ashamed of awfulnesses I've done & aware that I will do more before I die.

Join me if you like :)

— Katherine Crocker (@cricketcrocker) March 6, 2017

I'm with you, Katherine. Writing this post was hard, knowing the mistakes I've made in the past and knowing the mistakes I'll make in the future.

Despite frequent accusations that I am really a Time Lord, the truth is I'm human. I'm going to make mistakes. The important thing to remember moving forward is that I need to learn from them.

Embracing Librarianship, Warts and All: My ENY/ACRL Keynote

Note: This is as close as I can come to recreating the keynote I gave at the annual conference of the Eastern New York chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ENY/ACRL). This post is based on my notes and my memories of what I said, and is not an exact transcript. In a couple of cases, I've removed references to specific people and things that were part of the conference in the interests of making it more blog-y. I want to thank the organizing committee in general for giving me this opportunity, and Emily Thompson and Tarida Anantachai in particular for all their help.

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Before I get into my talk, I need to make a confession. The first thing I did after the organizing committee approached me and I said yes to giving this keynote... the first thing I did was to freak out.

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On an intellectual level, I got it. The theme of this conference ("Building Supportive Organization Cultures in Libraries," or more colloquially: "Librarians helping librarians.") is one of the driving forces in my professional life and it’s the reason I started blogging in the first place. But there’s still something a bit overwhelming about having your passion recognized. I've spent so much time kicking and screaming and shaking my fist at the profession, that when the world finally turned around and started paying attention, it was a moment of "Oh, [expletive deleted]!"

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I know it’s supposed to be bad form to share fears and insecurities about public speaking in an actual talk, but it feeds into the actual theme of my talk: owning that I’m human.

I’m not exaggerating, however. Letters to a Young Librarian has always felt like me shaking my fist at “the man.” Forget about how weird I feel now that I’m an administrator and therefore kind of “the man” myself, I wasn’t in charge of much of anything back when I started writing. So let me tell you about what led to the birth of my blog and why I’m so passionate about the theme of this conference. 

The first thing was that I finally, after years of meaning to, got around to reading Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke. If you’ve never read it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Ours is a creative profession, and anyone who is creative for a living needs to read this book. Next, I read something about a woman who started a blog that turned into her career, and I realize now that it planted a seed for me. 

Shortly after reading those two things, I was supervising a library science graduate student in his culminating experience - kind of a cross between an internship and a research project. I asked him one day about how his classes were going, as I often did, and this time he started complaining about having to learn an outdated piece of technology. It turned out it was a piece of tech I’d complained about when I was learning it a decade prior, and it had been outdated even then. I brought that conversation up with some coworkers over lunch later that week, and found out that library hand - the specific kind of handwriting librarians used for cards in the card catalog - had been taught in graduate programs as late as the thirties despite the invention and proliferation of typewriters. We were still teaching it, "just in case." Outdated curricula was not unheard of, in other words.

And that's when I got angry.

And that's when I started writing.

Something else has been making me angry lately, which brings me to my real topic today of owning our mistakes. That’s this: there are so many talented librarians who feel they don’t belong.

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I want to backtrack again for a moment and talk about my path to librarianship.

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I left college with a bachelor of arts in american history. I know that my liberal arts background prepared me better than almost any other experience for this profession. However, at the time, I had no idea what to do with my life. I bounced around to different jobs - residence counselor for an autistic teenager, bookstore clerk, assistant manager of a Roy Rogers, secretary… The last one was particularly miserable, and I realized I needed to find an actual direction. So I took one of those much maligned career aptitude tests. I don't know why those tests are so eschewed, because it worked for me. I don’t remember much about the test, but I do remember that librarianship was the top result. And it made so much sense. There was the fact that my favorite job I’d ever had was at that bookstore, mostly because of the kind of people who came into that store. Also, my godmother was a librarian and loved it. Finally, and I don't talk about this publicly very often, my very first kiss happened in my hometown public library. I’m not one to believe in fate, but there was a definite constellation of events that took the shape of me becoming a librarian. 

One important thing to note, though: I’d never worked in a library a day in my life before I applied to library science graduate programs. 

Obviously that didn’t get in my way, not too much anyway, but that’s a story for another time. I’m telling you all of this to express that when I was the new kid, it took me a while to feel situated as well.

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I sometimes have a hard time believing I’ve been at this librarian thing for twelve years now, because I still remember how it took me a long time in my first professional position to be able to trust myself, even though my boss and coworkers seemed to trust me well before that.

The thing is, there are still sometimes when I feel like I’m playing a game of “fake it til you make it.”

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I’ve struggled with this feeling off and on throughout my entire career, truth be told. And I’m far from being the only one. Meredith Farkas wrote about it recently, too. If you don’t recognize that name, she writes a blog called Information Wants to be Free. Great stuff, that blog. Anyway, she recently wrote about her struggles with “gut churn” (a concept she got from Jad Abumrad's keynote at ACRL this year).

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"Gut churn" can loosely be defined as the specific way your stomach hurts when you try something new and scary. The whole post, which is titled “True confessions”, is worth your time. But one passage resonated with me:

"There are people who say they admire me. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that because I don’t think I deserve it. I’m also uncomfortable because I worry that it creates this false expert vs. novice dichotomy that might make them think they can’t achieve what I have. Anyone can do what I’ve done."

I don’t know if I agree that anyone can do what Meredith has done or what I’ve done or what any publicly successful librarian has done, but I do agree that most anybody can have career success. I’ll explain the caveat of “most” below, since I don’t want to lose the current point - the “false expert vs. novice” point. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this is, why we have this false dichotomy. One thing I think might be contributing is rampant perfectionism. Between photoshop, romantic comedies, bootstrap myths, and a few other forces in our culture, we really do think we have to be perfect. I’m not immune to this feeling which, if left to fester, can lead to self-doubt and feelings of vulnerability and eventually shame.

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I can feel you shifting uncomfortably even if I can't see you. And I get it. Talking about shame, and it’s partner vulnerability, in a professional context feels taboo. But if we’re going to get to the heart of why so many people joining this profession or taking new steps in the field are feeling so alienated and out of place, then we need to talk about the emotions.

And to do this, I’m going to borrow wholesale from the work of someone who researched this stuff for years: Brené Brown. You may know that name because she’s given two hugely popular TedX talks or because she sometimes gets to hang out with Oprah Winfrey.

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I feel the need to explain that I’m not a member of the cult of Oprah, so I’m glad I didn’t let Brown’s association with Oprah stop me because I’ve come to embrace Brown's work. Her definition of shame has stuck with me and it is integral to my thoughts on helping other librarians: “shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that won’t be worthy of connection?” Let that sink in for a moment. Something that won’t be worthy of connection in this hyper-connected world? And yet we all know this feeling, this “I’m not good enough” feeling.

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I wasn’t sure if Stuart Smalley, a Saturday Night Live character portrayed by Senator Al Franken in the 90s, would work as a joke for everyone in the audience. For those of you who don’t know, the joke was a show about self affirmation and Stuart was known for saying “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.”

I want to share a few more Brene Brown quotes with you before I go on. I’m sharing them because they are the things I hold to me when I’m feeling small and scared and vulnerable and weak.

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I think these quotes might help you, too. Brown says “This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world.” She also says “Vulnerability is not weakness.” and, more to the point of my discussion, “vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.”

This leads me to my main point. If we want innovation and progress and new strong leaders, we have to support vulnerability and we have to stop stigmatizing mistakes.

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Okay, I already brought one non-librarian into the mix. Next I want to talk to you about Joi Ito. Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab and is seen by many as a guru of innovation. He was interviewed a while back by Wired Magazine, and through the course of that piece, Ito ended up giving some rules of innovation. (My thoughts are in parenthesis, but the list otherwise comes straight from the article linked above.)

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure. (I printed out "resilience instead of strength" typed in a pretty font and put it on the bulletin board behind my desk so I see it every day and it reminds me.)
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them. (This is just as much about personnel and time as it is about money or physical resources.)
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety. (No explanation necessary.)
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects. (This is especially important in libraries. We’ve got to remember that it - whatever "it" is - may not look like what we expect.)
5. You want to have good compasses not maps. (It’s the future of libraries - and no, don’t worry, I’m not a library futurist - so there’s no way to know for sure what the future will look like.)
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t know why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it. (This is another nother one that doesn’t need explanation.)
7. It's disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience. (I feel the need to add “within reason,” of course - I’m an administrator after all)
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts. (Odd for me to advocate this as I stand here giving a keynote, stand here being presented as some kind of expert.)
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education. (Education too often is seen as having an end point, but learning is lifelong. Preaching to the converted by saying that to a room full of librarians taking time to travel to a conference, I know, but still, it needs to be said.)

Now it’s time for me to make another confession: even though these rules are a huge inspiration for me, I still have a hard time with letting go. The safety of doing things that we know work, even if new things might work better, is a bit of a siren song. The thing is, though, security is an illusion. Safety is an illusion. Colleges close. People get laid off. Budgets get slashed. With the current climate, whether we want to admit it or not, we all live in a state of precarity.

PRECARITY:

n. a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.

I had this discussion recently with my friend Jake Berg, the author of the blog Beerbrarian and one of my librarian heroes and peer mentors. His response cracked me up. He told me to shut up with my Buddhism talk.

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And this is the point where I break one of those unspoken and mostly sound rules for talks like this - I’m going to talk to you a bit about my religion. I’m a practicing Buddhist, but I’m not going to start proselytizing. A lot of people adopt aspects of Buddhism as a life philosophy and I want to teach you a small part of it that helps me more than any other when I’m feeling like I don’t belong. Buddhism teaches us that attachment is the source of all suffering. More pertinent to this discussion is that our attachment to some image of who we are supposed to be as librarians and as professionals, some impossibly perfect image, will cause us suffering and pain and shame. But being who we are, and allowing the mistakes to happen, will lessen that. It’s not a surprise that I’ve seen Ito’s rules of innovation described in terms of eastern philosophies. His ideas sound very Buddhist to me.

I’m going to give you some practical ways to apply my ideas in just a moment, but I want to share two caveats first:

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First, we need to be careful not to confuse feeling out of our depths - which is something that goes away with time and effort and support - with impostor syndrome, which is a whole other thing. It’s a bit lighthearted, that image, to be used to introduce something so important. Sometimes you have to laugh at things, regardless. Anyway, impostor syndrome is feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing and like you don’t belong even when you do. Also, it is way more prevalent among minorities and women than anywhere else. There are lots of good resources available on this topic, but I recommend starting with Alicia Liu's piece: "You Don't Have Impostor Syndrome, And Neither Do I Anymore." Another well written consideration of the topic is Cate Huston's "The Trouble with Imposters," which has this perfect definition of Impostor Syndrome: “faced with a hostile and discriminatory environment, one we are unwelcome in, our perception of our skills, our chances, and our abilities to succeed - change and suffer.” It's also important to be on the look out for the Dunning-Kruger effect which is when people are super confident in their skills but have no basis for that confidence.

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Second, and more importantly, is the reason I said “most” earlier. All of us need to be careful of our own privilege. The drawing above this paragraph is the first panel of an amazing comic by Jamie Kapp that explains one kind of privilege, the kind that is afforded to Caucasians. Like me. Really, I look the part of a librarian - white, female, middle class, middle age - and that gives me access and opportunities I might not have otherwise. It gives me access to the biggest privilege of all: the privilege of making mistakes. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest you do some reading. (John Scalzi's "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is" and Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack" are good places to start, but go further. Learn about ableism and ageism and transphobia.) The next thing to do after that, to be frank, is to check your privilege.

Now I know this is a bit longer than what you're used to reading on LtaYL, so I’m going to wrap this up soon. I’ve beaten the drum and have set out a call to action to you all, so I want to tell you how to move forward.

First, to my fellow managers and administrators, reward sticktoitiveness. There’s all sorts research into the importance of grit and perseverance in the attainment of long term goals, and librarianship is definitely a long game. Mistakes are going to happen, but we need to keep going when we make mistakes and we need our staffs to keep going when they make mistakes. We need them to learn from their mistakes, too. So reward that gumption. So long as it doesn’t cross over into stubbornness.

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Second, to my fellow experienced librarians and other library professionals, be honest about your mistakes. Most of us were new professionals well before social media was a thing so our early career mistakes weren’t going to be on such broad display. I know we’re all so eager to share our successes, but like in high school math class, we need to be willing to show our work and the mistakes we make along the way.

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Finally, to those of you who are new to the field: be patient.

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And that leads me to my favorite quote from the book that inspired the name of my blog:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

~Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Thank you.

Mistakes Happne

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Today is another post where I'm not sure I have advice so much as questions, but it's been on my mind a lot lately so I want to share. You see, I've been thinking a lot about change and innovation. Mostly my thoughts have centered on how it's a messy messy process. But also, I've been considering how innovation intersects with impostor syndrome. This idea is at the heart of a keynote I'll be giving later this month, a keynote I'm still writing. So here I am writing a blog post about it since I needed something for today and since I think best when typing.

Idea #1: Mistakes Happen
Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. This isn't just lip service here, either. I have made plenty of mistakes myself. There are the small ones like the blog I tried to start at my last institution that was all book reviews by people associated with that school and geared towards people associated with that school. I think I got about 4 posts before the blog died. Then there are big ones, like my ill-fated step outside of librarianship. I try my darnedest to learn from all my mistakes, but the best thing I learned is that there is no avoiding them.

Idea #2: Innovation Means Mistakes
I don't mean innovation as a buzzword. I don't mean innovation for innovation's sake. What I'm talking about here is the constant but purposeful drive to improve and grow and reach. The Wright Brothers were famous mistake makers. As was Edison. How about Einstein's math skills? Or Temple Grandin? Famous innovators, all. Mistake makers, all.

Idea #3: Being New Means Mistakes
Something I try to convince new staff members of is that we expect them to make mistakes. It's not that we don't think they are smart enough or capable or hardworking, it's just that there's a learning curve. Always. Even if you're just starting at a new library after decades as a librarian, you still have to learn the culture. But I know I've had problems with feeling like I'm faking it, even though I have a mentee of my own.

Idea #4: We Have to Make Mistakes Less Scary
This is the part where I'm kind of stumped. I know that it helps me to keep a Joi Ito quote, "Resilience over strength," in mind. But I've had years of experience to teach me how to bounce back from mistakes. I was a lot less secure about it when I was new to the field. I believe those of us who have been in our fields longer need to be more forthcoming about our mistakes. I've also got some thoughts about rewarding smart mistakes, but those aren't as fully-formed.

Does this make sense? Does it at least make more sense than Madam Cur-catie up there? What do you all think? I'd really love to hear from people, either here or on Twitter or even via email, on the subject of supporting people as they learn and make mistakes.


And, for the record, the typo in the title is on purpose. Inspired by one of my favorite hashtags. 

Remember Your Why

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I had a bit of an epiphany last week.

Before I get to that, let me give you a rundown of my semester. The biggest factor is that I'd been losing my focus in the midst of the slog of the day-to-day, 90% "and other duties as required," nuts-and-bolts existence of  being a library director. Beyond that, there's also the fact that I went to ACRL and had a great time, but I came away with not a little envy for the important research and writing so many of my colleagues are doing. Don't get me wrong: I'm still passionately committed to the role that my blog plays. There is a huge need for giving and sharing practical advice that is still based solidly on experience and research, but I am sometimes envious of the people doing that research.

I know the end of the semester is a wearing time for anyone, and we've had our share of challenges in my library. Last week I finally made myself sit down to do a bunch of small tasks, like filing and making sure my budget tracking spreadsheets are up-to-date. After spending a couple of hours like that, I was feeling especially bedraggled, so I decided to take a break for a little professional reading. As it turns out, this was exactly what I needed.

After catching up on a few blog posts, I decided to revisit The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor. This isn't a book review, but I wanted to cite the source of the spark for a series of thoughts that resulted in a series of tweets. 

"This is bigger than just you. This is bigger than just the library." (Note I just wrote to myself and put under my computer monitor.)
— Jessica Olin (@olinj) April 14, 2015

Thinking about the significance of my daily grind of paying bills and answering emails. Sometimes I forget it's all about the students.
— Jessica Olin (@olinj) April 14, 2015

Like I said, this isn't a book review, but it's important you know the general idea from the passages in the Achor book. The part I revisited was mostly about how, if we can keep our "why" in mind, all the noise and nonsense is worth it. Heck, even the never-ending stream of listserv "unsubscribe" requests can become bearable if it's seen in the right light. And that brought me back to the fact that libraries are about educating our patrons how to educate themselves. In the teensy academic library where I'm the director, that means the students. And that's the moment I started to tweet about it.

And I'm not the only one who has this focus:

@olinj I have a note on my bulletin board that says "it's not my library." Sometimes a needed reminder.
— Rebecca Carlson (@CaptainLibraria) April 14, 2015

@olinj I also remind myself of this! Our goal should be making things easier & better for our users - they're why we're here.
— Mandi (@RuralMandi) April 14, 2015

It can be easy to lose this focus. I wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't lost and then found mine again. Each of us are in this field for a reason. Maybe take a moment and write it down on a sticky note like I did. Remembering that it's about our students can even help you handle misery-inducing hours-long all-campus meetings with equanimity.

How do you keep your focus? How do you keep hold of your "why"?

What a Difference a Year Makes: My First Year as a Library Director

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My one year anniversary as a library director has now come and gone (this past weekend), so of course I'm feeling reflective. This first thing I want to say is so clichéd I'm almost embarrassed to mention it, but it doesn't feel like a year. In any given moment I can feel like I've been here barely two weeks and then in the next moment it feels like I've been here twenty years. I've made progress, but honestly, I don't think I have a good handle on the experiences I've had since I first started this job.

I do know I'll never be done learning how to do this job, whatever I might have thought coming into the position. However, I've come to realize that I do know what I'm doing a lot of the time. Nevertheless, taking stock of the last year feels like taking stock of a roller coaster while still on the ride. But I'm going to try, anyway. The long-ish list below isn't in any kind of order, but it represents some of the biggest lessons and experiences - both good and bad - that I had over the last year.

1. I had to fire someone. The situation was clear cut and I had given the individual more chances to fix the situation than anyone who I asked for advice would have given. I did the right things at every step, including consulting Human Resources and my boss. I documented everything and always spoke with this person in private when the issue came up. Doing it right didn't matter, in some ways. When it finally came time to tell this person s/he no longer had a job, it was hard.
2. I put my foot in my mouth. I know we all have a propensity for saying the wrong thing on occasion. Only thing is, when you're the boss - even at a small library like mine - what you say carries a lot more weight, both positively and negatively. When this happened, I put my big girl pants on and apologized to the other person involved, and the experience taught me to be a lot more circumspect in the way I say things at work. (Yes, I'm admitting to making a mistake. Hard to do this, but since the point of my blog is to start de-mystifying the profession, I've got to show the bad bits on occasion).
3. I started with the intention to change as little as possible for the first 3-6 months, and I'm sooooooo glad I managed to stick to that for the most part. There were some issues that needed to be addressed immediately, but those were clear-cut and impacted the safety and security of the library building, staff, and patrons. Other than safety issues, I needed that time to get to know the community I'm serving (something I'm still doing, for what it's worth).
4. Despite taking that time to observe, I felt overwhelmed so many times during my first year that I lost count.  I know now that this is par for the course for new managers, especially new library directors, but that knowledge wouldn't have helped me much the midst of the bad moments. I worked 60+ hour weeks during my first six months, and still felt like I wasn't making any progress. I wanted to prove that they hired the right person, to prove their trust in me. I'm still trying to let go of interviewing for the job I already have (phrasing I got from my College Library Directors' Mentor Program mentor), and I've cut back to 45-50 hour weeks. The work will never be completely done, and maintaining a work-life balance helps me be more productive during the hours I am at work. I manage the stress better now, but it's not gone.
5. Another thing that helps with my stress is the group of allies I've gained. The work of making connections came early and often, but it's also continuing and never ending - especially when it comes to faculty and other mid-level administrators like me. I've bought coffee for quite a few people, taken others out to lunch, and sent gigs of emails with important links and helpful information. It's working, too. The therapy dog event I ran was done in concert with an ally's department. I'm about to submit a grant that I'm co-writing with a professor. Another professor put some money for the library in a grant he submitted recently. I got to steal ideas wholesale from our academic resource center, using their methods to professionalize our student workers. My ally in the admissions department is going to help me get some data. And so on.
6. The biggest thing I can tell you from my first year of being a library director is something I actually already knew: you will not survive any job without your friends/mentors (peer mentors, friends from different kinds of libraries, etc.). I have a group of people who believe in me, who hold my hand and assure me that I am sane, who make me laugh, and who inspire me. Sometimes the relationships are more sustained, other times they consist of a tweet or a blog comment. Every bit helps.

A Librarian's New Year's Resolutions

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I know what you're thinking: New Year's resolutions are so outmoded. People don't keep them, statistically speaking, so why even bother? The truth is, I keep more of mine than I break - especially the ones I've made in the last couple of years. Further, I find that letting others know that I'm trying to make changes helps me stick to the changes. I know my friends and colleagues wouldn't judge me if I backslide, but it feels like a promise I've made when I tell others... and that helps me stay the course. So this post is me letting someone know, and encouraging you to do the same.

In 2014, I resolve to:

Make more local librarian connections/friends. As has been written many places (including on this blog), administration/management can be a lonely business. I have some wonderful colleagues among the staff at my current college and have even forged some friendships with members of our faculty, but that isn't quite the same thing as being friends with other librarians. Besides, I want some balance.

Read more professional literature. A lot of the professional development reading I've done over the past year has been in the form of audiobooks, which isn't the most productive method since my commute is only 10-15 minutes. I'm going to carve out an hour or two per week just for more reading.

Write more professional literature. My blogging time is sacrosanct, but I want to get my voice further out there, so I need to find more time for this. Besides, there are some open access publications that are edited by librarians who I really admire (Leslie Reynolds is part of the editorial team at Practical Academic Librarianship, and Barbara Fister is part of the group at The Journal of Creative Library Practice), and I want to support them.

Make new mistakes. Lots of them. Don't get me wrong: I'm planning to succeed lots, too. I like to take risks, but they are always calculated. However, if I'm willing to embrace my mistakes - and learn from them - successes won't be too far behind.

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Finally, I resolve to spend more time concentrating on my professional strengths (as opposed to my weaknesses). I just finished reading Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, and the results I got when I took the associated test, the Clifton StrengthsFinder, were startlingly accurate. I like the idea of working with what I'm already good at, and finding partners to balance me - instead of trying to be all things to all people.

In case you're interested... My top 5: Ideation, Input, Strategic, Learner, Communication. #strengths
— Jessica Olin (@olinj) December 26, 2013

How about you? Got any professional resolutions you'd care to share?

Tomorrow's Problems

"Thinker on a Rock"

This weekend I finally got around to reading a Harvard Business Review blog network piece that was published last year, "If You Were the Next Steve Jobs..." by Umair Haque, and it has me thinking lots of thinks. Two of the five problems he identifies are places where libraries have got it all over big business - areas where we excel. The other three, however, are places we need to work. At least that's where my thinking has gone, so I wanted to share:

The first problem identified by Haque is Singularity. This is the one place I think libraries differ from big business. He asserts that they know how to do things on a big scale. Libraries, on the other hand, aren't always the best at scaling up. The good news is that we do know how to do the opposite. Librarians are the kings and queens of singularity; making a difference for individuals is our bailiwick. Maybe big business could learn from us for a change.

Another area where libraries have got it going on is Sociality. We may not always understand how to do the social media thing, but we do know how to build relationships with our community/customers/patrons. Individualized readers' advisory and research assistance, study spaces appropriate for large groups and small groups and individuals, and programming for all ages. We've got relationship building covered.

As for the issues I see us having in common with Hague's typical audience...

Spontaneity is a huge problem for us. Even at small libraries like mine, there are still hoops to jump through. And what's worse, we are so inured to it that we don't always notice how stodgy we are. I know there are good reasons for checks and balances, but they get in the way as much as they help. For instance, it startled me when my last job called me within days of my interview to offer me that position, because I'm so used to academic hiring practices going glacially slow. Don't even get me started on the reactions I get from librarians who work at research institutions when I tell them it took me six months to get a new program started - "How did you get it done so quickly?!"

Synchronicity is another problem we face. There is so much "Us vs. Them" thinking in libraries and academia that it can be impossible to work together. I'll admit even I fall victim to this one. I do my best to build relationships across my institution; I like working with student life and academic affairs and even athletics, trying to build consensus with students from across disciplines, etc. What's best for the college is important to me, but I'll admit that I fight tooth and nail for what the library needs and wants. If I'm not careful, I can get deeply into "Us vs. Them" thinking when it comes to budget planning.

Finally, and this is a big one, he discussed Solubility. In Hague's words: "the biggest lesson — and the one hidden in plain sight — is this: creating institutions capable of not just solving the same old problems, forever." From buildings that were finished just before laptops became a thing to libraries and librarians jumping on memes that are sad and out-of-date, we are too often behind the curve. From graduate programs to individuals to the institutions where we work, too many of us are solving yesterday's problems. Looking forward instead of back is one of the biggest reasons I look outside of libraries to see what's coming, because if businesses are dealing with it now, sure as shootin' I'll be dealing with it soon.

I still have lots of ruminating to do, but the point of Hague's piece, of solving tomorrow's problems instead of yesterday's... Well, that's an idea that has a lot of appeal. I'm not sure if the problems Hague lists are the problems of tomorrow's library, but they are a place to start. What do you all think?

My (On Purpose) Mistakes

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There's less than a month before the new school year, and I've got a lot of ramping up to do. Part of that, because I've got a frozen position and work at a small library to begin with, is getting ready to do a lot of information literacy instruction in the coming months. (Not that this is really a problem, since I love teaching.)

All this means that I've been thinking about what has and hasn't worked in the past, and how I can apply those ideas to a new setting. Of course, I've written about this a lot in the past. I was an instruction librarian for my entire career before this position, so that is probably isn't a suprise. But I realized that the one thing I haven't discussed before is my policy about making mistakes.

And here it is: in every info lit session, I make sure to make at least a couple mistakes.

Why is that? Well, here are my reasons:

• If I make a simple mistake, like a spelling error or clicking the wrong button, I can show students how to recognize it when they make their own inevitable errors.
• Further, I can also show them how to recover from their own mistakes.
• Which means that the person/people to whom I'm teaching whatever tools or skills will feel more comfortable experimenting since they know they'll be able to overcome setbacks.
• And it also means that I seem more human and approachable.

I'll admit it took me years to feel comfortable doing this. At the beginning of my career, I was mortified by the slightest misspoken word. But really, I think showing students how to recover from mistakes is one of the most important things I can do as an instruction librarian. Technologies and interfaces change, but comfort with experimenting and learning from mistakes are transferable skills.

How about you? How do you feel about making mistakes when you're teaching?