Publish or Perish, by Kaylin Tristano

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Once upon a time a patron taught me a very important rule – if it’s not on the Internet, it must be by midnight. In other words, if you’re searching for something that doesn’t seem to exist, it becomes your responsibility to create it. The same is true for sharing knowledge in a professional context, whether by publishing in academic journals, writing for a blog, or presenting at conferences.

When you’re new to a role, a job, or even an entire discipline, you naturally have a lot of questions and all the answers are out there as long as you know where to look – professional publications, textbooks, conference sessions, social media, colleagues, etc. But as you gain experience, your questions get more complicated, the answers are harder to find, and you begin to notice that you’re on level ground with the people who used to have all the answers.

This is when you start creating your own solutions to the problems you’re encountering, and it’s also an optimal time to start thinking about publishing or otherwise sharing these experiences.

The first time I realized I had valuable things to share with my peers was at an academic library conference. I went to a session on utilizing iPads in the library – my school had been circulating iPads to faculty for some time and I hoped to learn new and better ways to facilitate learning on the tablets. The presentation was instead geared toward audience members looking to institute an iPad program - I was an advanced student listening in on a beginner’s lesson.

Finding yourself with more talking points than the presenter (or knowing the frustration that sets in after an intense and fruitless Google search) can signal a responsibility to start producing your own answers. But putting yourself out there for the first time, either in writing or quite literally by getting up in front of a crowd at a professional conference, can be a daunting or downright terrifying idea. The fear of public speaking, of potential embarrassment, of giving a 50 minute presentation on an idea that’s obvious to everyone else, may stop some from pursuing publication and sharing the valuable experiences they’ve gained on the job.

Many in academia – including librarians – are pushed to “publish or perish”, but librarians typically identify as information curators rather than creators. Besides,  the courage and motivation to share can be difficult to find. You may shy away from writing for publication out of the concern that your work is not groundbreaking enough to be worthy of an audience, because you’re not one of the ‘rock star librarians’ who regularly make the conference rounds and enjoy name recognition, or because what you want to say doesn’t have mass appeal, or even because you’re skittish about publicly disagreeing with a big name librarian.

 But all you really need to do in order to publish or present or share your ideas is say, “I had a thought and I believe some of my peers would benefit from hearing it.” It’s not a matter of revolutionizing the profession or synthesizing entirely new ideas – just do what librarians do best and make the answers you’ve found accessible. Gather, organize, create, and put it out there for everyone who might have the same questions you did before you created your own answers.

Share those answers.

And there’s no reason you can’t dip your toes slowly into the water before taking the plunge. If you have something you want to share and you’re not sure where to start, think small and let the idea snowball:

• Talk about your topic with your colleagues or on Twitter;
• Write a few blog posts for others in the field who accept submissions [editor’s note: Like this blog!];
• Start your own blog if the spirit moves you;
• Turn your idea into a poster session for a professional conference, then stand back and let your work speak for itself (bonus: fielding questions about a poster is a great ice breaker to help you work up to the idea of presenting a session);
• Join a committee or professional organization and be active in it – having friendly faces and connections always makes sharing your ideas easier;
• Partner with a colleague to present a session together – share both the work and the spotlight.

Just get your ideas out there so they’re not stuck in your head, benefiting no one but yourself. If nothing else, it’s your responsibility as a citizen of the Internet.

Kaylin Tristano is a writer and solo librarian/technology guru for a small career college in Akron, Ohio. She is the webmaster for ALAO and has written and presented on a variety of topics from library instruction to using Twitter as a networking tool. Her student worker provides the following testimonial: “Kaylin is not as funny as she thinks she is.”

My (Incredibly Awesome) Writing Group

First, before explaining my writing group, I want to give credit where credit is due. The inspiration for how we run things came from a lot of different places, not just one. Part was inspired by a workshop I attended at ALA Annual, "Get Writing! Overcome Procrastination, Remove Roadblocks and Create a Map for Success." Part comes from the book Publish and Flourish by Tara Gray (a book that a previous writing group brought to my attention). Part comes from How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia. And finally, part comes from the weird and wonderful confluence of the three members of the group - me, Michael Perry, and Nicholas Schiller.

Second, if you're having a hard time getting yourself to the keyboard, having to answer to someone else can be a huge help. I've participated in writing groups before, and I recommend it very highly. I'm going to tell you how my current writing group works, but there are lots of other permutations you can explore. I especially recommend looking at the handout available at the "Get Writing!" link above for other suggestions.

Third, here are the rules of our writing group:

1. We must bring at least 500 words of writing to the group every week. This writing can be almost anything related to our professional lives, such as blog posts, book proposals, or grant narratives. (500 may not seem like a lot, but there have been weeks when it's been almost impossible.)
2. We set goals from week to week and hold each other responsible. Example of goals: "I'm going to revise the blog post I brought last week;" "I'm going to write an outline of the chapter I have due at the end of next month;" "I'm going to find some outside reviewers to give me feedback."
3. If we don't bring the 500 words and meet our goals, we suffer the wrath of the disincentives. Yes, you read that correctly: instead of using incentives to encourage writing, we use disincentives to discourage slacking. We have chosen two organizations that we all find abhorrent, and if we mess up we have to donate to one of these places. $5 for a first infraction; $10 for a second; $20 for a third; etc. And yes, we've got rules about one "Get Out of Jail Free" card per year and special dispensations for "acts of God."

Finally, here is how our meetings go:

1. In case you didn't already know, my writing group doesn't live near each other. Mike is in the Chicago area; Nick is in the Portland, WA area; and I'm in Dover, Delaware. This means we meet via Google Hangouts.
2. We meet for an hour every week, come hell or high water. (Well, there was that one week we were all so swamped with work that none of us could see straight...)
3. We stick to this agenda every week (which really does take the whole hour):

1. Quick check in to see if we’ve met our goals for the last week;
2. Each person takes turns getting feedback;
1. 9 minutes for everyone to read & make notes;
2. 3 minutes each for the other two to give verbal feedback;
3. Goal setting for the next week and emailing the electronic version of the document to the author.

There's something about this combination that really works for us... so incredibly well that I wanted to share. What do you think? Could this work for you?

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?

It Can Thereby Be Proven That One... Should Talk Like a Normal Person

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There is so much to love about academia - the challenge, the communities we serve, the commitment to growth - but there is one thing about this world that I absolutely loathe: academic speak. Pick up any academic journal, in library science or any other discipline, and you stand a good chance of seeing it. The third person pronouns, the passive verbs, the conditional language, and the fifty-cent words that get in the way of any kind of the meaning. I despise it all so much that, when I taught freshmen writing classes in the past, I went out of my way to pick topics where the academics in that field talk like people.

The thing is, I'm not the only one who feels this way. There are many essays, books, articles, etc., to which I could point that all make the same point: plain language is teh bestest. Just so you know I'm not fibbing about this abundance, here are two of my favorites (both of which are so good that they were assigned reading for the freshmen classes I taught):

• "Politics and the English Language," by George Orwell
• "'It Can Thereby Be Shown...,'" by Rachel Toor

I'm bringing this problem up here because of a book review I wrote that was published last week. The book itself was okay. It definitely had its issues, but there were also good bits. My big problem with the book is how the authors' adherence to academic conventions absolutely got in the way of readability. It's too bad, too, because the topic was so promising.

I'm not sure how to combat the problem of Academic Speak, other than writing as plainly as I can manage in my blog and, when I get the chance to do so again, influencing undergraduates to write that way, too. What do you all think?

You're Going to Piss People Off, by Kelly Jensen

"you wanna mess wit me?" is a Creative Commons licensed photo by Doramon

Whether you’re just joining or have been part of this profession for a while, we all have our goals. Ultimately, we want to provide as much as we can in the best possible way in order to make people happy, regardless of what our title or work place looks like.

Except no matter what you do and no matter how hard you work on something, you're sometimes going to piss people off at the same time, be it patrons or be it your colleagues. There is no way to be an effective change maker or advocate for yourself and services without making someone unhappy.

I'm a people pleaser. I hate when anybody is unhappy with me, and I go out of my way to ensure that what I do and what I think doesn't impact other people negatively. But when you're working with people, you're going to interact with people who are unhappy. Who will always be unhappy. And you're going to work with colleagues and other professionals who don't see what you're doing is as valuable as what they're doing. So when you step up and suggest a change, you're going to cause a scene.

You have to grow a pair and realize that none of those angry feelings relate to you personally at all. They are directed at something bigger, be it the fear of change or the fear of not understanding the value of what it is you're pursuing.

Ignorance is scary.

In my first position as a teen librarian, I had no shame in adding any book that sounded good to my collection, which served those in grades 6 – 12. Guess what? Six months into the job, I had an angry letter from a parent, suggesting one of the books her daughter checked out was completely inappropriate for a 12-year-old. How dare I purchase and promote such materials in the library?

The letter rattled me, as I had only been a professional librarian for, well, six months. Now I had an angry parent and if she had written me a letter, surely there were other people angry about how I was performing collection development.

I immediately assumed I was a terrible librarian. It had to be my fault her daughter borrowed something she shouldn't have. It was the collection I created, after all.

Wrong.

After reading and rereading the letter, I came to accept the problem was not me in the least. It was the parent not doing her job. It was the parent who allowed her daughter to check out material she wasn't comfortable with. I wrote a letter back, stating clearly that the teen area served all teens between 6^th and 12^th grade.

By relenting with one person who was pissed off at me, I'd in turn be doing a disservice to the rest of my patrons. Those books needed to be there to serve my entire diverse teen population.

Putting a firm foot down on your expertise and on your ethics will not only piss off patrons though. Eventually, you're going to piss off your own colleagues.

Enter ARCgate 2012.

I wrote a blog post talking about a situation that left youth librarians at a disadvantage when it came to picking up Advanced Reader Copies of forthcoming titles at the American Library Association convention. That single post caused a surge in hate comments, in angry Twitter rants, and at least two blog posts from well-known library-world bloggers. I was called selfish, greedy, and a host of other uncomplimentary things by people in my own field for standing up and speaking about something I believed in. That many others believed in, too.

I spent two weeks seeing my reputation and my words being torn apart and misconstrued. But through each new thing I read, I reminded myself over and over that I had said what I said because I believed in it. I reached out to those who could institute a change for the betterment of not just myself, but other librarians who felt the same way I did.

Change is happening.

My voice was heard.

These are two personal examples. I could talk about other times I pissed off parents with my collection development policy or about the time I told the area homeschool groups about our library's teen programs (which included a paranormal program that contradicted one group's very conservative beliefs) or about the time I quit a library job without a backup plan because the environment was not conducive to making me my best, personally or professionally. The thing is, no matter what role you're in and no matter how much or how little experience you have in the field, your beliefs and values are going to piss someone off somewhere.

To be as good as you want to be and to further your goals in providing the best service and experience as a librarian, you have to suck it up and stick to your beliefs.

That's not to say don't follow the rules. Just push against them as much as you need to. That's the only way change can happen. If it means pissing off one or two or six people for the betterment of a community? It's worth it.

Kelly Jensen is a librarian for teen/adult services at a public library. She tweets at @catagator and blogs at Stacked Books.

First Thursday's Just For Fun: National Novel Writing Month

November means a lot of things to people: Thanksgiving, apple cider donuts, Movember, and so on. For me, though, and an ever-growing of community of people online and around the world, it's all about National Novel Writing Month.

Although I think the event's tagline, "Thirty days and nights of literary abandon," captures it all, let me give you a brief overview: the point of it is to write a complete novel in one month. Yup, you read that right: a complete (draft of a) novel. Well, technically, it's a short novel since the goal is 50,000 words, but it's still a novel at that length. You can plot and plan all you want ahead of time, but you don't start the actual writing until November 1. You can declare yourself a winner if you finish by November 30. It's not impossible - just 1,667 words per day - but it is a stretch, especially considering the fact that most people have jobs, families, lives, etc.

Despite the stretch, I have crossed the finished line twice now - in 2010 and 2011. I'm not sure why I've been able to manage it, since I know that plenty of people who start don't finish. All I can say is that there's something freeing about the quantity over quality nature of this quest. First drafts always suck, but I can't always give myself permission to ignore the internal editor. But NaNoWriMo does the trick, every time. She is still there, strong as ever, at the beginning of every November, but since creating something perfect isn't the point, she becomes increasingly easier to ignore.

So, why do I do it?

It's not to get published. I haven't yet done anything with the completed drafts from the past two years, other than a utterly desultory attempt at editing the first couple of chapters of the 2010 project. That's also not the point (even though there are a number of NaNoWriMo projects that have gone on to great things).

The point is to do something completely for fun, completely for me, and with no real goal other than that 50,000 word count. I know that I will, at some point, fall madly in love with my project. I will, perhaps the very next day, fall out of love with it and want to ditch the whole thing. I will, repeatedly, get so lost in the world I've built that I'll be startled by the contrast between it and the world in which I live. And that's why I do it. For me, the point of NaNoWriMo is fun.

Anybody else doing NaNoWriMo this year? Leave a comment?

p.s. For those moments when I can't shut the editor up, I turn to the most evil website there is: Write or Die. There's a particularly cruel setting that will actually start deleting your words if you don't keep a steady typing pace. Cruel and unusual... and effective for breaking through writer's block. I recommend it highly.

Finding Your Voice, by Maureen Barry

Wright State students help prepare Chesterhill Produce Auction for it's opening during their week-long service trip to southeast Ohio last spring break.

When I was on the job market in 2004-2005, as I was finishing my MLS, I applied for both tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions. I preferred non-tenure because, like many new librarians, I hadn’t yet discovered my voice. Why jump into publishing if I didn’t have anything to say yet? This idea came back to me in the response I got to a question I asked during a phone interview, “What are the benefits of the non-tenure position?”  She said, “I like this situation [non-tenure] because I don’t feel pressured to publish, but I am supported if I want to publish.” 

It wasn’t until about five years into my career that I got the urge to start publishing. It happened when one of my friends, Dr. Sarah Twill, a social work faculty member at my current institution, introduced me to service-learning. Service-learning is a teaching and learning pedagogy that closely ties together course content with service to the community to help solve real-world problems. It’s different from volunteerism in that service learning is a delicate balance of curricular materials, service, and reflection.  It’s also different from internship because an internship is usually done after your coursework is complete. (See Andrew Furco’s continuum for further explanation.)

The more I heard Sarah talk about service-learning, the more I was hooked. One day, I thought to myself:  How can I use service-learning in the for-credit information literacy course that I co-teach? Has it been done? My thought was that incorporating service-learning would attach a real-world component to the course making the class a more meaningful experience not only for me, but also for my students and our would-be community partner.

A journey into the literature revealed NO instances of such a course, although there was some discussion about the parallels between information literacy and service-learning (see Riddle, 2003). Hmm. I realized I might be on to something here, even though no one else appeared to have tried it yet. So I went for it. (If you’d like to read more about the course and how it came to be, see my article, “Research for the Greater Good:  Incorporating service-learning in an information literacy course at Wright State University,” in the June 2011 C&RL News.)

Then I had a light bulb moment near the end of my first quarter of teaching the service-learning information literacy course. I was walking across campus with my supervisor when I said, “I may have found my niche with service-learning.”  She responded, “If you want to be known for service-learning, you need to start a blog.”  All I could think was, “Ugh. Really? A blog? Do I really want to write THAT often?  She’s right though – it’s what we librarians do.” And now, looking back on it, I’m really grateful to her for giving me that push.  At the time, I really didn’t want to blog; but when your boss suggests something, it’s hard to say no.  So, here I am, the self-labeled Service Learning Librarian.    

Because of my blog, I was invited to write a two part piece for LOEX Quarterly (Part 1; Part 2). Loanne Snavely, an academic librarian, recognized from my blog that my course engaged students with the library in a unique way, so she contacted me because she was seeking chapters for Student Engagement and the Academic Library. I have also been invited to be a panelist for the Women’s & Gender Studies Section of ALA’s President’s Program at the annual conference in July 2013. And finally, just a few weeks ago, I was contacted to blind review an article about service-learning in library education.  All of these opportunities presented themselves because of my blog.

In addition to my for-credit information literacy course, my success has helped me seek new opportunities to partner with faculty and instructors who incorporate service-learning pedagogy.  Over the past few years, I helped instructors pair information literacy and service-learning in English composition courses. I was the embedded librarian in an honors interdisciplinary service-learning course about sustainability in Appalachia, co-taught by Dr. Sarah Twill and an instructor in Earth & Environmental Sciences.  This course includes a week-long service trip to southeast Ohio.  Yes, in case you were wondering, I went on the trip.  It was without a doubt the most meaningful interaction I’ve had with students at Wright State.  Another benefit is that these experiences have provided new material about which I can write and present.

Service-learning has been a rewarding way to serve both my community and my profession. I’m grateful that I discovered the concept here at Wright State. Or, perhaps it discovered me. Either way, I found my voice, and I continue to develop it through seeking new service-learning experiences at my institution, giving presentations, writing, and also a little reading, of course.

If you haven’t found your voice yet, don’t worry. It will come. It doesn’t happen overnight, so don’t get discouraged. It took me almost 5 years to figure out what I could possibly offer to my field that was new and different.   

Maureen Barry is the First Year Experience Librarian at Wright State University in Dayton, OH. She tweets @SLLibrarian and blogs at Service Learning Librarian.

What Was I Saying?, or Finding My Writing Agenda

It’s taken me a while to figure out what it is I really want to say about libraries – almost 8 years. I’ve been thinking about why that is, especially now that I have a direction. I think it’s mostly due to the kind of career I’ve built for myself. You see, I’ve always been some kind of public services librarian at small, liberal arts colleges. That means I’m a professional generalist. This isn’t a complaint. It’s actually one of my favorite things about what I do for a living, but this kind of career doesn’t translate well to a research & writing agenda. Sure, I had interests from day one. Website usability; applying traditional pedagogical research in the information literacy classroom; building relationships with faculty, students, & staff; integrating graphic novels and genre fiction into an academic library’s collection… all of these areas fascinated me then (& still do now), but I couldn’t decide which I wanted to pursue.

Since then, I’ve heard and read a lot about librarians writing for publication. I’ve been told, repeatedly, that even the greenest members of our profession have something to contribute. I don’t disagree with that sentiment, not in general. If I’d been forced to write, perhaps in a tenure track situation, I would have figured it out. On the other hand, with the way my interests have changed, I probably would have ended up with a schizophrenic publishing history. Perhaps I would have come to the same place of comfort that I’m in now, found the same passions, if I’d been writing from the beginning, but I doubt it. Because I had time to explore and become comfortable, I know that most of my early interests were related to being a better librarian. For instance, my never-ending quest to be a better teacher means I’ve read a lot about pedagogy, andragogy, and epistemology. I love teaching, and I like knowing that my information literacy instruction practice is grounded in theory. However, as much as I love doing and reading about teaching, I have no desire to write about it. Further, the ideas that make me want to add my voice to our professional literature didn’t even occur to me until a couple of years ago, and didn’t solidify until very recently. It might have taken me 8 years to get here, but I’m so glad I waited because now I can feel confident that this is really what I want to say and how I want to say it.

Do even brand new librarians have something important to contribute? Absolutely. If you are burning to add your voice to library literature, please do. On the other hand, if you want to hold back, want to immerse yourself for a while before speaking up, that works, too. The most important piece of advice I could give to anybody new to my beloved profession is this: it’s your career path, not anyone else’s, so you’ve got to make it your own.

Your turn: If you are published or planning to publish, how did you pick a topic? And how long did it take you to get there? If not, why aren’t you writing?

Speaking of writing agendas, next week’s post will be about mine.

Also, come back on Friday. I’ll be publishing the first in what I hope will be a long string of posts from guest authors. My first guest is going to be Cari Dubiel. Cari is the Assistant Manager, Adult Public Services, at Twinsburg Public Library in Twinsburg, Ohio. She has two blogs of her own: a personal blog, Walking Identity Crisis, and an official Twinsburg Public Library one, The ABC Book Reviews: A Beth and Cari Production.