Banned Books Week - Cause for Celebration?

Why do we celebrate Banned Books Week? Well, it's a worthy celebration, but a more apt title would be "Freedom to Read Week" or "Freedom of Ideas Week." I think this topic is more complex than most readers acknowledge. It's no fun to celebrate a negative thing, but if that injustice is still pervasive in many parts of the world, then it's important for those of us who have the right to read as we choose to do so and to celebrate this right.

I learned this lesson through the lens of another issue: gay rights. I remember having a college professor look me in the eye and tell me he was not against gay rights but then he said unequivocally, "What I am not in favor of is gay pride!" He was a professor I respected and I think this really mixed me up for a while. I think what he meant was that this is a difference we're entitled to, so why focus attention on it as if it's a virtue?....sounds a bit like Banned Books Week.

In the ten years since I graduated from college I have thought of that conversation many times and have come into my own in terms of challenging that professor should our paths meet again: so long as gay rights are not universal, I applaud any and all celebration of the rights that are secure for the gay community (which, by the way, are not all-inclusive...as if we didn't know). Gays in Israel and Palestine need to see Americans celebrating this difference so they can at least have a distant glimmer of hope for their own situation. (Sorry for this diversion into non-library matters. I just watched Freedom on the Rocks.)

But when I promoted this post last week I called it "I can think of worse things than banning books..." and I can. What is the real problem with banning books (there is one, this is not a rhetorical question)? The problem is that the people for whose supposed benefit the books are burned do not see the power play in progress: if a book is banned or burned, it's probably a book I want to have. So the real injustice is either people not knowing that or not having any recourse to obtain the information being banned.

In this month's Harper's there is a great article that finally confirmed for me that I am not the only one thinking along these lines, although I admit it is totally unconventional. [I also highly recommend (for what that's worth) the article entitled The Western Cannon by Jason Armagost.] John Leonard, in his review of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, brilliantly points out that, "The fact that 15 million books were destroyed in Poland from 1939 through 1941 is not the most important thing to know about the Holocaust."

Celebrating the freedom to read is fantastic, and working for greater freedoms everywhere is even more fantastic. From where I sit that means increasing access to transportation for the sick, elderly, working poor, veterans and people with disabilities. So I think there are greater lessons to be learned from Banned Books Week than those contained between the covers of a codex. What do you think?

Embedded?

Okay, I have avoided this topic long enough. For several months my "Coming Soon" sidebar has promised a post on whether I am embedded or not. While I am not ready to reconstruct my blog with a new address (I originally tried for "Sassy Librarian," but that was taken), I am ready to open myself up to the possibility that, as many have suggested, I am not, in fact, embedded, but "only" a special, solo librarian in as traditional a sense as that job can be.

I have tried to remember where I originally heard the term "embedded librarian" and why I grew to see this position that way. I remember that the first time I heard Susan Fifer Canby's brilliant notion that "special librarians work in the white spaces of the organizational chart" was when her colleague Karen Huffman addressed my Information Systems class last fall. Perhaps I have confounded the terms "special librarian" and "embedded librarian," and perhaps the latter term is too young to warrant a full-on debate of my status.

Mary Talley and Dave Shumaker are currently researching this topic through an SLA research grant. Their survey takes into account organizational structure, proximity to physical library resources, administrative reporting requirements (i.e. is your boss a librarian?), and other criteria that will eventually lead to an operational definition of embeddedness, or at least a cogent spectrum of models of embeddedness. While the vast majority of my Google alerts on "embedded librarian" return tales of academic instruction librarians embedded in Freshman Composition courses and accounts of media librarians embedded with subject specialists, I still feel a pull toward the moniker because of the structure of my position within this organization.

I work with transportation people. We have a dozen or so technical assistance specialists, a webmaster, a finance department, and me. I do manage a print library but that is a very small part of my job. I am not exactly part of the "program staff," but I am more involved with the substance of what we do than the accountants and the webmaster. My boss has tasked me with becoming a "content generalist." So far, maybe I am just a solo special librarian in a very small organization that is going digital. But consider this....

My salary comes from three separate federal grants, each of which calls for a part-time information specialist to carry out its strategic goals. My primary project, which determines who my supervisor is and how I spend most of my time, is to provide information services to a National Resource Center that is housed at our organization. The National Resource Center team consists of six staff people: five program staff and me. While in our team meetings, I feel I am the quintessential "embedded librarian." I am a full-fledged member of the team, but I have funding through them because they need an information specialist. Parts of what I do may not be considered library-like, but all my tasks can be improved by drawing on my library science education.

So where does that leave me? We may have to wait for Shumaker and Talley to publish their study before making an informed decision. In the meantime, I hope this topic will encourage the blog-comment-activity I have tried unsuccessfully to encourage on this site, but which will be a nice primer before I draft my "Controversial Topics" posts later this fall.

Back to School Series: Part I

Over the next few weeks I will be chronicling the juxtaposition of my two fall courses, History of the Book and Foundations of Digital Libraries. So far, the overlap is clear. Both professors, in different buildings, on different days, in different quadrants of the District--and they have different native languages and home countries--uttered this maxim: "There is nothing new under the sun." Professor Delfino drove this message home by tearing up a copy of From Fields of Gold by Alexandra Ripley, and then having us narrate our reactions as he pulled the pages from the spine. We learned that our feelings about destroying an "old" medium would likely not be replicated by watching him delete an electronic text file, but there would still be some analogous loss. There is nothing new under the sun. The issues we are dealing with with e-books are not so different from the issues we dealt with when transitioning from orality to literacy. We also learned that we are still in said transition (and we got to play with a Kindle!). Perhaps the most important moment in class was when Professor Delfino said, "Wikipedia is a fact of life." Later in the semester each student will fact-check and enhance the content of a Wikipedia entry about publishing.

Professor Choi wisely made us go all the way back to Vannevar Bush's As We May Think to ground our study of digital libraries and prepare us mentally for the digital collections project that will account for most of our semester grade. We got one hell of a history lesson from her on Day 1, which occurred conveniently less than 24 hours after Delfino's dramatic spectacle. There is nothing new under the sun. As humans we will continue to create and synthesize content, and then automate access to that content, whether our medium be digital libraries, hypercard stacks, or compact shelving.

Stay tuned for more confluence and collision as I navigate my penultimate semester of library and information science!

Transferable Skills Part 2: From Linguist to Librarian

In my former life I was a linguist, or at I least aspired to be. I wouldn't describe this as a complete waste of time (even though I hurried back to school to get my MLS after only two years on the job market with my MA in linguistics). Au contraire...studying syntax got me into programming, and programming got me interested in information science.

One of my favorite topics in linguistics, and the fastest way to explain the field to those who think it is the work of William Safire, is to describe the interplay between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to language use. In a nutshell, look up the word unique in the American Heritage dictionary and compare what you find there with the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for the same word. Not all dictionaries are created equal. Linguists can create a whole curriculum based on dictionary comparisons...but does the average person even know who wrote his or her dictionary?

The same can be said of search engines. People like to claim that their information came from an authoritative source, without knowing much about that authority. "Google said so" is not a far cry from "it says so in the dictionary." Get to know your sources. There is more than one way to write a dictionary and build a search algorithm and to the lay person these distinctions are often overlooked. There are ways of diplomatically explaining this and reaping the benefits of all sources. It starts by acknowledging that there is more than one place to go for information.

But it begs the question: is there truth, or is there only information? What do you think?

Guest Blogger Steve Jeffery: How Job Hunting is Different for the Non-Traditional Librarian

Steven Jeffery is an embedded subject specialist librarian at a state agency who is finishing his MLIS at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. His interests include information architecture/organization as well as web development.

As I was looking at signing up for my last three classes in the fall I decided to take a bold step and start looking for a full time job prior to graduating. I did this for two important reasons. The first was cost. As I calculated it I would be far better off financially to find a full time job and spread out my last few classes than to continue in grad school full time through the rest of the 2008 calendar year. The second reason was that I could. I was enrolled in a program that offered both on-site and on-line coursework, making the transition completely seamless. From there I had to decide what I was going to do. I am something of a self-taught IT generalist and I wanted to work in an environment where those skills would be utilized. Along with this I recognized that most library environments were not dynamic enough to hold my interest. Beyond this I was really not at all certain what I wanted to do or where I wanted to work.

My first step in my job hunt was to get advice from my professors and to work on my resume (which you can find if your Google-fu is strong). The immediate problem that I encountered in getting advice is that most professors in my program had been in academia for at least five years and few had any experience with non-traditional librarianship. This is not to say that they were not able to provide advice (and a couple of them were fantastic) but I had to disregard much of it as being not applicable in the corporate world. One example of this would be volunteer service. Public librarians in particular will emphasize the importance of having experience in a library setting. In the public environment this may be true, but in special libraries (and the corporate environment in particular) its value is much degraded. While doing this I was also trying to improve my resume. I recognized that most jobs I would be applying for would be at larger corporations and so I attempted to tailor my resume to this. The largest issue I ran into was that few people could fully understand my background. People in IT would ask where my programming skills and project management background were emphasized, because to many of them that is the extent of IT. Librarians would ask about my volunteer service and cataloging work. Those in business would read through it and not understand more than every few words (and miss the concepts entirely). I never did find a good solution to this, but I think the final result was acceptable. After this I began my job search.

Living in a major city at the time I used a number of different job boards. My list of these and comments are below:

• Indeed – Probably the best as well as the easiest to use.


• Monster – Overall it was pretty good but failed in many cases because the more entry-level/early career jobs tend not to be posted here (probably due to the cost of posting)


• Milwaukee Jobs – Terrible sorting of results but was overwhelmingly the best for local jobs


• CareerBuilder – I believe the only thing I ever got out of here was spam


• Dice – Helpful but most of the jobs are heavily programming oriented

Once I had my list of sites I then conducted regular searches based on a keyword list (developed from my resume). I tried to do the searches twice a week, usually on Wednesday and Sundays. I would conduct the search for the keyword and open all of the jobs that were a possibility in a new tab. When I was done with the site I would quickly browse through every listing and print* all of those that were a strong possibility. Finally, I would thoroughly go through each and apply to those that I was interested in. This also helped when interviewing so that I could know exactly what had been communicated. In addition to this I kept a spreadsheet containing the company, job title, posting date, submission date, submission format, etc.

Results
There are daily stories in the news about the state of the economy and the difficulty in finding jobs but from what I saw this is not true for this industry. Those businesses that recognize a need for these skills are unlikely to not hire for them because of an economic downturn. Once someone begins and demonstrates their success, their position is much more secure both because of the niche factor (nobody is available to cover for the position) and hopefully the outcry from other employees that depend on the position. The position which I eventually took was not in the corporate world but in a government library. This was for a number of reasons but the most important was the challenge. The position was as a subject specialist at a library where none had ever been in any kind of similar role. And while the pay is low by most standards the opportunities and the challenges make it worth it.

* I would keep printed copies of all job postings and correspondence as postings tend to disappear after a few days to weeks.

Librarian as Patriot

I am patriotic. I am liberal. I am anti-war. And in what I feel is in no way contradictory, and in every way a natural outgrowth of these traits, I am a librarian. Libraries and librarians are two of the most enduring manifestations of American values and the American dream: inclusion, opportunity, free enterprise, freedom of information, education, free speech. Some things in life are free. Be one of those.

Sixty-six years ago, in a letter to SLA president Laura Woodward, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt heralded the work of special librarians as being "on America's front line." We can be. Are you? An oft-quoted part of that letter says special librarians do their work "anonymously and unsung." While this is a fitting tribute to many, there is no reason the anonymity has to continue. Express your librarianship, and your patriotism, with pride.

To those who know me it comes as no surprise that in my library office I have a large American flag, on the North wall, to its own right, as specified in flag code. Not only am I a patriot, I am a patriot who is not afraid to show it, and not afraid of those who think the flag, particularly since 9-11, belongs to the right or to those who openly support the current war(s). I have flown my flag since long before it was commonplace, and I will continue to do so even when the contemporary yet precarious popularity of flying it fades.

FDR's tribute is as timely as it is timeless, even if it means different things to different people.

Access to a transcription of FDR's letter appears in "Selective Publication of Information" by John Sherrod, on page 387 of the 55th Anniversary issue of Special Libraries, July-August 1964, volume 55, number 6.

Information Empowerment

What are you doing to empower others to access and use information for the benefit of your organization's mission? Consider asking to be included on various work groups' conference calls, ask for a "spotlight" in the organization's newsletter, or request five minutes on someone's meeting agenda. Add a "Meet the Librarian" blurb to your organization's website and/or the intranet. Keep it short and sweet: describe the information products and services you offer, be open to feedback, and solicit training suggestions (keep in mind that some employees will prefer group training and others will prefer one-on-one training). Let them know you are there! And smile....

Ready About? Transferable Skills for the Embedded Librarian

Yesterday I sailed for the first time in my life. And I mean, I sailed. My boss, whose boat I had the pleasure of sailing on through the Chesapeake Bay, let me steer for a while. All I had to do was choose a fixed point on the horizon and pretend I was guiding the boat toward it. Easier said than done, but it worked. And with a little more practice, the feel of the delay and the muscle memory will help me steer much better. Knowing yoga proved to be an excellent transferable skill for steering a sloop (and spending a few hours with sailors transfers well to crossword puzzling). Guiding the steering wheel was very much like learning tree pose (vrikshasana): choose a fixed point; breathe in; remember your objective; breathe out.

Object, inhale. Objective, exhale.

If your job description is fluid, know what you know, and be ready to demonstrate it if asked. Most librarians have had other careers, and so they have other skills. Use them. Bruce Rosenstein uses this model for marketing specifically, but it works for librarianship in general:

• Know what you can do.


• Tell them you can do it.


• Do it.


• Tell them what you did.

Yesterday I steered my boss' boat, and although I was only able to maintain this for five minutes, he was watching, so he knows I am capable. He also knows that I have been trained on advanced layout techniques in Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, just to give one concrete example, so if the opportunity arises for me to get into more publication work here (or publish my own library newsletter!), I'll be ready, and he'll know that I'm equal to the task.

Will you be ready if your boss asks you to steer?

Beyond 2.0: The Internet Librarian Conference 2008

Get ready for the 2008 Internet Librarian conference! This year's theme is Beyond 2.0: User-Focused Tools & Practices. Pre-conference workshops offer everything from advanced search techniques and social networking for libraries to a two-day K-12 track for school librarians.

The conference, to be held in Monterey, California, will feature many of the biggest names in the Library 2.0 world, including SLA President Stephen Abram, Information Broker Mary Ellen Bates, and Sophia Guevara of the Kellogg Foundation. Special sessions include webmetrics exploration using Google Analytics, and library automation (a hot topic this year)! Also, don't miss the exhibit hall with representatives from top vendors and i-schools. A great place to network and pick up some S.W.A.G. ("stuff we all get").

Be there or.....attend virtually, by following the conference wiki and blog.

Postcard from Copyright Camp

This week I am attending the Institute on Intellectual Property Issues in Library and Information Centers at the Library of Congress. We are learning from such reknowned experts as Kenny Crews, Donna Ferullo, Marybeth Peters, Georgia Harper, Seth Watkins, Scott Bain, Cindy Weber , Dave Shumaker, Kim Kelley and Beth Winston.

Thursday's Supreme Court ruling regarding the DC handgun ban, in addition to coming from within shouting distance of LC, set an interesting backdrop for our discussion of DRM and fair use. Shall we go with what we think the framers intended two hundred years ago or shall we interpret the law in today's context? Some contemporary issues in which the fair use doctrine, section 107 of USC 17 (The Copyright Act), impacts library and information services include digitizing public domain works, preservation of library materials, the TEACH Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA regarding anti-circumvention technologies.

We also visited the Institute for Museum and Library Services where we heard from Kaydian Smith about the inherent tension's between WIPO's stance on protected cultural expresions from indigenous communities and UNESCO's draft provisions for preservation and dissemination of those expressions.

A Tribute to Iowa Libraries

During the two years I lived in Iowa, I probably spent half my waking hours at one of three local libraries: the main library on the east campus of the University of Iowa, the downtown Iowa City Public Library, and the Coralville Public Library, which was three blocks from my house. Both the campus and the community are blessed to have a very strong library system with competent, caring people behind the reference desk.

At the campus library, I spent hours in the east wing of the 4th floor, near the P118s and such...tracking down books for the professor I served as a research assistant. When you are that high up in the library, especially on the far east side near the windows overlooking the education building, the Iowa wind can be so strong, whipping as it does on the old campus buildings, that you can barely concentrate. Rows of study carrels give way to doctoral students' cubicles (a little nicer, with cabinets), and at the end of the wing you'll find small offices with closing doors for visiting scholars. Near the central corridor of the 3rd floor are the bound theses and dissertations that always greeted me with a rather foreboding presence as I made my way toward the serials starting with "J."

At the Iowa City Public Library, which opened a completely remodeled branch while I lived there, I attended a City forum in which citizens were asked for public comment on proposed redevelopment of the downtown area, specifically looking at mixed-use buildings. The community rooms in this library probably get as much use as the stacks and newspapers. Active civic engagement is a big part of Iowa City life, and the library--located in the center of the pedestrian mall--is a huge part of that lifestyle. From the main reading room you can look out over the ped mall summer concerts, Marco's Grilled Cheese stand, and a group of Hacky Sackers playing and skating in front of the Tobacco Bowl.

The Coralville Public Library is where I tutored an African friend who was learning to read and trying to make it as an immigrant in Southeast Iowa. The librarians always helped us find a quiet corner where we could work together and still be able to talk at normal volume. The video collection and large print chapter books were great literacy aids that were offered to us. We also spent a great deal of time across from the reference desk, learning how to use an atlas one week, an encyclopedia the next, and always looking up a few words in various dictionaries before leaving each time. The reference desk greets you right as you walk in, and they have a great view of the community display case which, in the time I lived there, featured such important community groups as La Leche League, a local cancer support group, and of course, information on the local farmers market, which met just behind the library, often with live music in the summer. My husband started a magazine writing class with the help of the Coralville Public Library, and was still dependent on their assistance and their Internet connection when he had his first short story published. We will forever be indebted to Iowa Libraries!

Hold a good thought for the people, and the libraries, in these communities.

Postcard from New Orleans

At our annual conference last week, I proudly introduced myself as "the librarian," since our staff is pretty small and newcomers were easily spotted by members and board members. I was told more than once that I did not look like a librarian, but never during my session on social bookmarking, which garnered much interest, enthusiasm, and yes, praise (that's just for me to keep in mind for my performance review)!

The link between del.icio.us and our members' notions of what the company librarian does was easy to forge-I began by saying that librarians organize information and, based on the system they use to organize it (be it a card catalog or a del.icio.us account), they use that system to find the information later. So far, so good. The del.icio.us presentation came through almost more easily than the wiki presentation, so needless to say we sent a message. The best part was being able to tell the audience, some of whom were just learning to use Google, that we are only one step ahead of them so we will continue to reach out to them and help them expand their skills as we expand ours.

Key to both presentations were the Common Craft videos expertly produced by Sachi and Lee Lefever. And during a session I was attending, I was lucky enough to receive an email from Lee Lefever himself! Thank you, Lee Lefever. We couldn't do it without you.

Work your Wiki Magic

I cannot say enough about how Sachi & Lee Lefever's Common Craft Show has enriched my start as an embedded librarian. It takes a genius to explain things so simply! I don't think anyone had ever even whispered the word "wiki" before I came and now the office is abuzz with ideas on to integrate this very simple technology into our daily routines to manage even the most complex of federal grant projects. Wiki-wiki! It's all happening so fast.

Next week I get to present this and other Web 2.0 tricks to our Association's membership at our annual conference. To all those who said this place would never let me do more than "shake people's hands," beware...I am taking Louisiana by storm and changing the world one wiki at a time!

Don't worry, I will definitely send a postcard! Keep smiling and get those wikis up and running...

Embedded, for Better or Worse

Has being an embedded or solo librarian got you down? Try using your natural personality and characteristics to enrich your performance. I find that so much of how to do this job comes from how I can do it differently from how anyone else would do it. Not better or worse, but it's a strange phenomenon to be a librarian sans library, so figure out what it will mean for you and be that.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting many young librarians, some of them solo and/or embedded, at DC-SLA's new member reception. We compared notes on what it means to be embedded with the content people but not be one ourselves, and on the challenge of getting to know each staff member's individual needs to be able to deliver appropriate results. Although it is cliche, it is always good to remember that one size does not fit all, and probably never will.

I imagine there is another way to do the job I am doing, but the longer I stay and the better I fit, I find it hard to imagine doing another job quite so well. The likelihood of there being a better fit for me is waning. And while I know that lunchtime euchre and practical jokes are not in my job description, I cannot imagine doing this job quite so well without those daily opportunities to enrich office relationships.

Take advantage of outreach opportunities - however informal - so you can be YOU where you are, and in so doing, hone the most important skill you bring to your job. As Andrew Pace posted yesterday, "Knowing others well has always served me better than being well known." And smile!

Meeting of the Minds

Three tips for running an effective meeting:

• have an agenda with a goal printed at the top of it;
• have a time limit for the meeting, if not for each agenda topic;
• make sure all attendees are clear on the action items they are leaving the meeting with.

Three tips for being an effective participant:

• limit your notes to your own to-do items unless you are the designated notetaker;
• if you are one who tends to say too much in meetings, limit your contributions to three comments or questions; if you are one who tends to say too little, try to make at least three contributions, however small, before the end of the meeting
• listen! listening is a form of participation that counts twice as much as speaking if you do it well; as an active listener you may be called upon to restate what has or has not been said if the conversation goes in circles.

Three tips for being an effective meeting observer:

• listen! be aware of the group dynamics;
• be aware of where the conversation is going with regard to the stated goals or agenda for the meeting;
• take detailed notes from a "stranger's" perspective; make sure your notes are clear with regard to what has been decided, what action items were assigned and to whom, and what issues remain unresolved.

Planning and running a good meeting--even a short team round-up or regroup--is an art! Running a bad meeting is SO EASY. Have your meeting be a good one!