I just had to go outside and smell the rain- it is glorious spring in Texas, and I’ve been inside for so long, working and writing for school. My old-fashioned azaleas are gone from the bushes, and the live oak trees are dumping tons of golden pollen on the street- I know my neighbors love it as much as I do (get out the zyrtec and flonase, everybody…) I will be heading to the country for a day or two next week, to see the bluebonnets. For those of you who have no access to bluebonnets, please see the banner. 

Ok, those of you with real library jobs: tell me what you think about professionalism in our field. It never occurred to me that there was a debate on the topic (even though some of my cousins were surprised when I told them I would need an MLS to practice.) Then the new folks in the program from (insert large school district name here) began discussing an article in the paper about leadership in the school district failing to support school libraries: 

“leaders were adamant that they wouldn’t hold themselves to the state’s basic — or “acceptable” — guideline for libraries, saying the standards are unrealistic and sometimes impossible…The pledge to improve comes in response to an unflattering audit released Monday that shows that 42 percent of the libraries aren’t staffed with the state recommended number of certified librarians, while 94 percent don’t have enough clerks.” 

The snubs don’t end in school libraries. I read Meredith Farkas’ blog this week, and she had much more to say about deprofessionalization and the lack of support, both financially and in terms of valuing what we do. In our readings this week Farber notes that professors typically don’t like to share their classes with librarians, so it’s up to us to gain their respect and cooperation. Owusu-Ansah asserts that academic librarians have been “seen predominantly and exclusively as providers of support services… (that librarians are) a group never really considered legitimate faculty members, not even when its members had that official status.” 

So how do we counter this perception? Presumably we know how to engage faculty members, to make ourselves useful to their teaching and research needs. We know how to advocate politically and in the local communities for our libraries, how to conduct needs assessments and provide desired services, to provide needed information literacy instruction. NPR and Nancy Pearl and the Prairie Home Companion do what they can to call attention to us. What more does it take?

One of the best things about our class has been the opportunity to talk to academic library professionals in the community. It’s been really thought-provoking to discuss career paths with people well into the field. Two of the big shocks have been the discussions with Michelle Boule and with Veronica Arellano. To be perfectly frank, I thought Michelle had my dream job- or at least my dream first job out of library school. I loved the idea of doing new technology experiments and still having time to work with professors and students in my subject field. Turns out, there isn’t time for all that. It’s still a great job- just not what I thought it was. In their own way, it appears that large academic libraries aren’t all that different from large corporations: they suffer from the inertia brought on by size. That will require a different level of patience in my approach. Another surprise was Veronica’s choice to work in subject and instructional librarianship rather than special collections, another interest of mine. I hadn’t thought about how unlikely it would be for me to interact with students and professors on a daily basis in special collections.  

Hearing from the Dean of Libraries, Dana Rooks, and from Lee Hilyer, the Director of Research and Reference Services, opened up some ideas for me. I was impressed with the commitment by both of them to create an atmosphere where people are motivated to do the work and enjoy their team members. For now, I’m focused on the work of librarianship, but I can see how management may be satisfying as well. One of the things I like most is creating communication links between different groups of people in an enterprise-it’s one  of the main reasons I got involved in LISSA. That’s something academic librarianship will provide whether or not I pursue management, because there will always be opportunities to participate in university committees and get to know people from across the academic spectrum. 

Finally, I’m thinking about smaller schools and junior colleges too, after hearing what Sara Holland had to say about her work, and seeing how happy Cindy is at her job. It’s wonderful to be able to make a difference in student’s lives, and I can see how it becomes easier to know your students in that environment.

I assist in the Introduction to Information Access and Retrieval class, and two interesting issues are currently being discussed by the students. The first involves the firing of a new assistant librarian in Tulare County, California, who reported a man viewing child pornography to the police after her supervisor told her that a warning was sufficient, and it was unnecessary to report the matter to the police. (see the article in Library Journal online.) The community, as well as the class, has been outraged that the new staffer was punished for reporting a crime (child pornography is not protected speech-it is, in fact, a federal as well as a state offense.) The library has indicated that the person involved was fired for other reasons, although she had received a previous positive review. The second discussion has been about the plan of the Philadelphia Free Library to hire the homeless in the library café and restrooms as a response to the use of the library by the homeless for shelter and hygiene. (The class is generally encouraged by the choice of the library to become part of the safety net for the homeless.) These are just two very tangible areas in which we as librarians have the opportunity to apply professional ethics to the world in which we live and work. There will be many more, no matter where we find ourselves working. 

The current discussions helped illuminate the readings on ethics that we were given. I found White’s article on teaching professional ethics didactic and at its most extreme, undemocratic. Of course the role of education in librarianship is “to make students aware of the complexity of problems and options” we face. It does not mean, as he implies, that we should find ourselves “allied with child pornographers.” Jensen’s article was more useful for me. As he points out, “neutrality is impossible… we can’t pretend…by claiming to be neutral- that we can avoid accountability for our roles.” His goal is rather the pursuit of free and open inquiry of professionals, engaged in a truly diverse political dialogue. That looks more like the profession I want to pursue. I just hope it’s possible…

From G.E. Evan’s Developing Library and Information Center Collections, 5^th Ed.: “We were told that if one put one million monkeys at one millions typewriters, they would, in time, produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now that we have the Internet, we know that is just not true.” 

Here’s hoping that I’m not one of the one million monkeys. 

What brings this comment to mind is the new book by Lee Seigel, cultural critic and author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. Seigal sees the innovations of the Internet as deeply flawed, dominated by commercial interests and concerned only with popularity, not with accuracy or fairness. His particular concern is the transformation of news to a commodity based on personal interest: Seigel asserts that consumers will seek out sources of information that will tell them only what they wish to hear, that these sources are characterized by bias, “where the border between truthfulness and lying is constantly being eroded.”  

While Seigel may be somewhat of an alarmist, he did make me think about the enormous importance of information literacy education. The basics of information literacy, as identified by the ALA and ACRL, seem self-evident: the ability to determine an information need, to access information effectively and efficiently, the ability to apply critical thinking and analysis both to information and to sources of information, the ethical and legal use of information by the patron. I think, however, that inculcating this knowledge into higher education alone is insufficient for our society. Surely the precepts of information literacy need to be taught as soon as a child begins to use the Internet. When I read Rockman’s article on creating teachable moments, I kept thinking that parents and young children need to be similarly engaged. By the time a patron reaches college, individuals are already grappling with economic, social, and health issues that require sophisticated decision making, and the basics of freshman information literacy instruction seem too little, too late.

Apparently all weeks in graduate school can be counted on to be crazy- so much going on that I didn’t get around to posting until this week. Sigh. 

Michelle Boule’s discussion with the class gave me a lot to think about. Now, when you have a Library Journal 2008 Mover and Shaker come to chat with, you spend some time thinking about what she has to say, and how it connects with your perception of academic librarianship. Since her visit with us I’ve (1) set up a gmail account (2) added Jessamyn West’s, Michael Steven’s, and Jenny Levine’s blogs to my bookmarks, and (3) felt soooo guilty for not having time to set up my del.icio.us account (on my to do list since last year) or my googlereader account (also on my to do list since last year.) 

What I did Not feel guilty about is passing on IM, flickr, and twitter. Look, I’m a borderline introvert, which means I enjoy working with people, but I have to be alone to regroup and reenergize. The idea of being available 24/7 through a vehicle like twitter is the worst of all possible worlds for me. Is that a function of my age? Maybe. Clearly I’m a digital immigrant, not a native. But I keep going back to what Michelle Boule and Meredith Farkas say – Technology must save you time! I’m the poster girl for the person who loves the idea of all our tools but can’t seem to find the time to use them effectively. It’s all I can do to keep up with the blog, and I loved the whole process of putting it together and the possibilities of professional discussion.

To quote Farkas: “I think Library 2.0 led to a lot of librarians losing their way and you can see that in the huge number of library blogs, Flickr account and MySpace pages that haven’t been updated in months or years. It’s valuable to know how to use this stuff, but the focus should never be on the tools. Never. I know they’re fun to play with and it’s exciting to see the cool things other libraries have done with them, but that shouldn’t impact whether you use the technology or not. We should always be focused on our patrons’ needs.”

With regard to the readings: the word which has been resonating in my head after the second week is relationship. What is our relationship to the faculty and to the students? What is the relationship between user needs and our services? I felt the UH Libraries Strategic Directions position paper was well thought out, reasonable, even self-evident. Why has it been difficult to implement? In order to effectively transfer our knowledge of information literacy there has to be a buy-in by faculty into the mission. How is that accomplished? Clearly I have a lot to learn-

 

The first weeks of grad school are always the craziest; stress and more stress, so please excuse any lack of coherence. I really enjoyed some of the example blogs, particularly A Wandering Eyre (what can I say, I love English lit, and I found the LITA issues thought provoking) and Information Wants to Be Free (team leadership, and the usefulness or lack thereof of our fun Lib 2.0 toys.)

Did anyone else find the readings on open access alternately encouraging and really disappointing?  I found myself cheering Miriam Drake’s main points. Most science/medical/technology research is funded by public monies and should be available to the public without the prohibitively expense costs of the current publication model and without the difficulties of access. The technology exists to make the research readily available via the web, and some successful examples exist (see BioMedCentral.) Institutional repositories are providing author archiving for separate institutions and consortia of colleges and universities.

I come from the corporate world myself; that’s why the traditional publishing model (so far mostly insulated from market forces) galls me, especially since publishers don’t guarantee permanent access other than in print form. According to Raym Crow in his SPARC position paper on institutional repositories, the declining costs of digital publishing technologies have not been reflected in the pricing models of traditional publishers, while the opportunity costs and traditional barriers to entry in the market have fallen with digital technologies.  The rationale for a new model exists, if the academy will accept it. 

I can understand the reluctance of publishers to give up the gravy train, but I was very surprised to see how little support exists in the academy. I had lunch on Friday with a colleague who currently works at Rice, and she brought up the difficulties her library has in getting the faculty to make use of the institutional repository. Rice has been actively involved in the open source content movement. You might want to check out Connexions (cnx.org), an online environment for “collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the web.” The Rice president, provost, and dean of engineering are all listed as supporters on the site. However- tenure is still determined by publication in the traditional print venues, and very few seem to be willing (yet) to trust their career to the judgment of open source publications, no matter how distinguished the peer-review process. What a shame!  It is clear that the components of scholarly communication (registration, certification, awareness, and archiving) can and have been achieved by the open-source model. I think the impetus for change will be driven by the funders of scholarly research (mostly government entities such as the NSF, NIH, etc.) mandating author archiving or open source publication. Be sure to email your representatives! As librarians we can only encourage faculties to take advantage of institutional repositories and make them aware of the greater exposure open access publications receive because of higher rates of citation (see Crow’s position paper.)