PIPA/SOPA Are Bad News

Instead of blacking out my site for the protest, I'm going to abstain from social networking and provide information about why I'm opposed and information about how to get in touch with your elected officials to let them know you also oppose it.

Protect IP Act (PIPA):

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA):

Further Information:

• Jessamyn West did a better job of gathering up links than I'll ever do.
• The House of Representatives has a "Write Your Representative" page that lets you search by zip code.
• The Senate has a page that lists all senators.

I'll see you all Wednesday.

When to Say Yes, or "Another Committee? Are You Crazy?"

I'm writing this the day before the first meeting of a new committee on which I'll be serving. Yes, I'm already on three campus-wide committees (one of which hasn't met in 2 years - it's my favorite), two library committees, and a partridge in a pear tree. Yes, I am the same person who told you to avoid death by meetings and to avoid burnout. On the other hand, as my director told me, you've got to know "which hill you want to die on," and the idea behind this new committee is important to me - both personally and professionally - so I volunteered, despite my busy schedule. 

It will get in the way of other projects, but I asked myself some questions about this committee, and knew it would be worth the hassle. What questions did I ask? Well, since you insisted, here they are:

1. Do you have a choice? One of my current committees must have a librarian. If I hadn't accepted the committee assignment, my boss would have been the one to fill the gap. That's what's known as a no-brainer, so I'm on the committee.
2. Do you have time for it? If no, can it wait? Some of my projects are "Summer Only" because of how all-consuming they can be. Similarly, I've passed on committees that were interesting because I knew they'd take up too much time.
3. Would it be politically advantageous? Non-library search committees are a pain and tend to obliterate even dreams of free time, but helping another department by being their token outsider is never a bad idea. That goes double when it's an administrator asking for my help.
4. Will it look good on your resumé and/or annual report? I detest public speaking when the audience is made up of my peers, but I've started doing it regularly because it looks good. 
5. Even if you otherwise wouldn't need to be involved, ask yourself is it important to you or just so interesting/fun that you feel you have to? Refereeing late night dodge ball is hard on me since I'm normally in bed by 10 PM and the event always starts at 9:30, but I always volunteer because building relationships with students outside of the library is important to me. And trust me, watching undergraduates take dodge ball that seriously is always a fun time.

If I can't come with good answers any of the above, I say no. This is more difficult than sounds, but it's necessary sometimes. So choose your yeses wisely, otherwise this could be your epitaph:

What about you? How do you pick which projects you'll pursue?

Becoming a Departmental Liaison, by Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Many academic librarians end up becoming the library liaison to one or more academic departments, including librarians who don’t normally work in public services. A good liaison is more than a contact for the academic department. Good liaisons integrate themselves ever so slightly into the academic departments and become a resource faculty choose to contact first about any library issues. I’ve been a liaison to various academic departments and groups throughout my career, and below is some general advice on how to become an effective liaison based upon my experience.

Get to Know Your Departments
Sometimes librarians liaise with so many departments that getting to know them all is difficult, but ideally the liaison librarian should know something about the academic subject in question and how the specific department functions. This knowledge can be gleaned from the department website, faculty CVs, formal interviews, or casual discussions. On my list of recommended DOs:

• Learn faculty research interests
• Study the curriculum
• Analyze departmental strengths
• Look at dissertations or theses if relevant
• Talk to people

As you can see, there’s nothing difficult about this, but it requires active rather than passive librarianship. Passive liaisons wait for faculty to find their names and contact them. Active liaisons make their presence and capability known. However, there’s making yourself known and then there’s making a nuisance of yourself. Hence, my list of DON’Ts. Don’t:

• Constantly send emails giving faculty “important” library news
• Act as though you are their equal “partners”
• Pester them

This goes against the grain of a lot of librarian discourse. Librarians often claim to be the partners of the teaching faculty in the education of the students. Well, sort of, but the teaching faculty don’t see it that way. Regardless, even if it’s true that librarians are equal partners with the teaching faculty, it’s pointless to act on that belief if the faculty don’t agree. The liaison must persuade the faculty members to trust them.

Things to Know about Faculty
To gain that trust, it’s important not to pester them, but you also must understand their work and how they feel about the library. Here are a few things I’ve learned about professors over the years:

• They’re busy
• They don’t care about your problems
• They don’t care about library issues that don’t affect them
• They don’t think the library is the center of the universe
• They just want their stuff, as quickly as possible

To the idealistic new librarian, this might sound daunting or depressing, but it’s just the way the world is, so it’s best to accept it. However, there are a couple of other things it’s useful to know:

• They’re around a lot longer than the students
• If we show we can help them, they’ll direct students to us

Sometimes, liaisons are so eager to get to students that they forget who really holds the power. Students come and go, but professors remain for decades. If you want to integrate yourself more into the research lives of the students, cultivate the faculty and build relationships with them.

Building Relationships
Building relationships with departments takes some effort. I have some general advice, but how specifically to apply that advice will depend on the situation you find. Things you should do to start building relationships:

• Get to know the department chair and administrator
• Find out how things work
• Cultivate the faculty who use the library most
• Show you’re interested in and know something about their subject. (And if you don’t know something, learn something.)
• Look for problems to solve
• Solve the problems

Librarians like to gather information by searching databases, but this kind of “human intelligence” is best acquired in the field. If you get to know the department administrator and the chair of the department, it’s easier to find out how things work. It’s easier to cultivate the faculty who use the library the most if you know something about how scholars in the field work. For example, historians need different and more extensive library resources than analytic philosophers.

The final two suggestions are the most important, but the most difficult to specify out of context. The key is to remember that the faculty aren’t there to solve your problems, whatever they might be. You’re there to solve their problems, and the more problems you solve the greater a resource you’ll be and the more they’ll rely upon and trust you.

The problems vary. As an example, years ago I was the de facto tech support for a department chair because the department’s tech support wasn’t very reliable. Not my job? Not what I went to library school for? True. However, that support led to a very close relationship to the department in question. On another occasion, I ended up overseeing a private departmental library. That wasn’t part of my job description, but it built useful relationships I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to develop. The trick is finding problems to solve, but the good (or rather, bad) thing about libraries is that there’s almost always a problem that can be solved. If faculty have problems with the library and you solve those problems (important step!), then you’re on your way to success.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum is the Philosophy and Religion Librarian at Princeton University. Read his Academic Librarian blog at blogs.princeton.edu/librarian.

Adjuncting as Outreach and Marketing, or Professor Jessica is in the House

I'm pretty busy right now because I've been spending a lot of time getting ready for the new semester. You see, I teach as an adjunct professor at the same college where I'm a librarian. I've taught for the education department, the English department, and this semester (not for the first time) for the Writing Across the Curriculum program. I'll be teaching a First-Year Seminar (FSEM), which means I'll be teaching college freshmen how to write, read, speak, eat, breath, dream like successful college students. Okay, maybe not those last three, but by the time the semester is over my students will feel that way.

This is not easy work, especially when you layer it on top of my full time librarian position, but it's worth it. And I don't mean the money, even though I do get paid above and beyond my librarian salary to adjunct. No, I mean the way this part-time job of mine changes the relationship I have with members of my library's community. By spending so much time with students, I get to build a deeper relationship with them. Further, I have gained a reputation as tough but fair and as a go to person. It also enhances my relationship with faculty. When I am trying to convince a professor to change something about a research assignment, or to give me more time with his or her students, I can speak from experience about how to fit these things into a course schedule. This has helped me gain respect from faculty, especially since the FSEM gig has a well-deserved reputation for being a tough one. Lots and lots of grading plus it ends up being a bit of a gatekeeper course. Finally, and most importantly, it gives me a built in marketing and outreach platform. "Did you know the library has a gender studies database?" is easy to work into conversations with students when I'm the professor of the class, and I hear more about faculty research and curriculum interests when attending an informal lunch meeting of all FSEM professors.

I've talked to other academic and high school librarians who also teach at their institutions. I also know some public librarians who teach at colleges near their libraries. From these discussions, I assume that it's just as rewarding for them as it is for me. If you can manage it, it's a part-time job that I recommend.

What do you think? Have you taught any semester long classes? What was it like for you? If you haven't, do you want to? Why/why not?

*Party Girl* is Still My Favorite Movie About Librarians

Image from MoviePad.

I'll say it again: Party Girl is still (and will likely forever be) my favorite movie about librarians. You can have Noah Wiley, Katharine Hepburn, and Rachel Weisz. All I want is Parker Posey as Mary, a party girl who decides what she really wants from life is to become a librarian - MLIS and all. Why do I feel this way? A few things come to mind.

First, the fashion is as much a character as Mary:

Image from NylonMag.com

Second, the music is deliciously mid-90s:

Finally, and most importantly, this movie is fairly realistic in its portrayal of the profession. Sure, there's a rom com plot, but there are *gasp* real librarians. They come in different shapes, sizes, ethnicities, genders, ages, etc. There's discussion of master's programs, the relative merits of working in different kinds of libraries, and the script writers even included reference interviews.

For my money (and I mean that literally since I own it on DVD) this is the best movie about librarians out there.

What do you think? Is this your favorite? If not, what is?

Weeding is Where It's At: Deacquisitioning in a Small, Academic Library

Queen Anne's Lace, one of my favorite weeds.
(Picture from Jeffrey S. Pippen)

Simply put, collection development means both adding to and subtracting from a library's collection. That's why calling this activity weeding is so appropriate: both adding and subtracting are necessary in gardening and in collection development. I'm not 100% sure why, but I find weeding more satisfying than any other facet of collection development. Perhaps it's to do with how well I know a section after weeding, or maybe it's the satisfaction of having a physically attractive collection when I'm done. I know there are other librarians who agree with me, but it still seems like we don't weed enough.

I've done a lot of weeding in my career (although not as much as I'd like), and I've come to realize that the process is halfway between an art and a science. There are some clearly defined steps I take, but there's always the chance of something undefinable getting in the mix. Further, how I approach weeding a fiction collection is a bit different from how I approach weeding a science collection. To be truthful, it's not an easy process to describe, but there are some general things I always consider:

1. The physical book. This starts with a general browse of a section. If a book catches my attention, I pull it off the shelf to examine it more closely. I consider whether or not I was able to read the title on the spine, check the strength of the binding, look for markings and other damage, etc.
• If a book is in poor condition but I still want to keep it, the book might get replaced or rebound, depending on costs, availability, and the extent of the damage.
2. The importance of the author/work. I try to keep all major award winners (Pulitzer, Newbery, and so on). I also try to keep seminal works. For instance, there's something in me that doesn't like the thought of a fiction collection without authors like Oates, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, etc. 
• If I'm at all unsure about a book's importance, I check with the faculty in the relevant department(s).
3. Its role in my library's collection. If it's nonfiction, I look to see what else we have on the topic. If it's fiction, I check if there are other copies of the same book.
• Multiple copies of a novel are fine if I know someone teaches that particular author. For instance, we have multiple copies of Pride and Prejudice because we have an Austen scholar on campus. Similarly, we have more books about the literature of medicine than you'd expect of a library this size, but Biomedical Humanities is one of our majors.
4. Its role in our consortium's collection. If there are more than 20 other copies available in Ohio, that's a vote against keeping the particular volume. Conversely, if the copy in my library is one of the few, I keep it.
• This is not a strict rule. I've kept books where there are 50+ other copies in our consortium if it circulates a lot.
5. Circulation history. How many times has it been checked out and/or renewed? Considering the size of my institution, and the nature of the library, just one check out in the last couple of years can be enough to save a novel. Also, with nonfiction, there are some books that never get checked out but that get used frequently.
6. The undefinable qualities. There is, and should be, some wiggle room in weeding decisions. Any time I've kept a book where I had no reason to do so, this factor was always the reason. Modern Breeds of Livestock by Hilton Marshall Briggs, published in 1958, is my favorite example of this consideration. You see, there's no reason for my last library to have this book. It's a tiny, two year school, and they have nothing to do with agricultural studies. I doubt this book has ever gone out, but it is so dear and so misplaced that I just had to keep it. I believe that you need a couple of books that don't belong in your library because those titles give a library character.

The way I've described it here makes it seem like a linear process, which it isn't. Not really. Sometimes I start with a list of books that haven't circulated much, or with a book that's about to be shelved that catches my attention. The most important part of the process is starting it. After all, Seneca spoke the truth when he said, "It does not matter how many books you may have, but whether they are good or not.”

What about you? How do you feel about weeding?

Another Change in the Posting Schedule

Because of changes in my schedule for the upcoming semester, I'm going to need to shift my posting schedule again. For the foreseeable future it will be Tuesdays (new posts from me) and Thursdays (new guest posts).

As a bonus for coming to look at this update, here's a completely gratuitous clip from Doctor Who: