Return to Search

My Week of Extreme Slow was a success: I was as careful with each task as I was when I first started this job, except that this time I knew what I was doing. I had made the decision to try this for the sake of competence, and not necessarily as a spiritual "slow down." Nevertheless, I couldn't help but hear a great lyric from Tift Merritt looping in my head: "Most days I want to speed up; seems like I ought to slow down."

I was fortunate to have two veritable research requests during my Week of Extreme Slow. I don't know about you, but my job isn't exactly the way I pictured it would be when I was library school. I remember fondly that we had to make videos of ourselves doing reference interviews with mock search scenarios and then critique our own "performances." In that same class my teacher had us fill up blue books with kilometric Boolean equations. It may have seemed artificial and complex then, but it came in handy during an impromptu reference interview with a coworker.

My colleague was sure she had read "something" about how Detroit has run out of big box stores, with related statistics about urban nutrition. We talked for about twenty minutes, and I found myself drawn to the nearest blank sheet of paper so I could casually map out what we were saying. To my surprise it started looking like the draft stage of one of those reference exams--post-interview stage and pre-Boolean.

Besides capturing anything my coworker could remember about the topic, I tried to find out how long she thought it had been since she read this article or whether she remembered anything about the context. She knew she had seen it online, and fleetingly--possibly linked to a Twitter post. You know how it is when you're going through your own brain trying to figure out when or where you read something? It was like that except we were working together to pin down any clues, and I was jotting it all down. I also made sure to ask her if she needed this particular article or if anything describing the situation in Detroit would do. We agreed that I would try to find the essential information, and she would try to find the exact article, and then we would compare search strategies.

After some careful thought and planning, I found the article in my first minute of searching. The magic search phrase ended up being "food deserts detroit site:.gov." I limited myself to government sites only to get a manageable number of results to start with, but that ended up taking me directly to the article. (And here, by the way, is the not-so-elusive-after-all article.)

In the end it was not hard to locate the information, but my colleague and I front-loaded the work by mapping it out verbally before taking ourselves to the search box. It was a satisfying and collaborative conversation. It reminded me of what we always say about librarianship being the perfect marriage between people and technology.

If it seems insignificant to document one little search conversation, consider this: If you're a student, you need real examples of how what you're learning may be needed on the job. If you're not a student...well you might be a collector of search scenarios, in which case you can let me know in the comments what other paths I could have taken on my most recent search adventure.

Library Day in the Life

First thing first: this is my Week of Extreme Slow, part of my Embedded Librarianship Project. I was going to devote a whole entry to it, but I didn't want to miss out on blogging for the Library Day in the Life project. Then I thought, what better way to celebrate and explain my work than to explain how it looks under the microscope.

I started with a to-do list. I've never had a productive day at work without one. The list is not pretty, but by lunchtime about a third of its items had been crossed out, including the biggest, scariest item that I had been dragging my feet on forever.

One of my responsibilities is to plan, write, edit, format, and quality-assure content for a federal interagency website. The process is just a little bit ridiculous and resembles conversing via tin cans: I note changes to be made and transmit these to a federal officer who then contacts a government contractor to make the changes, who then contacts me... I'd have given up on this by now except that I have to document this dance in my quarterly progress report to our federal funders. While putting the changes together (slowly), I found a number of broken links and some mismatched content to repair--or, rather, suggest through my tin can that it be repaired--later.

The rest of my day was focused on cleaning out my inbox, which, although it is empty when I leave on a good day, has been growing fat with messages as if in preparation for this week's snowstorms. Most of the messages hanging around were events to be added to the calendar, alerts on special keywords that I like to find in documents, and notices that so-and-so is now following us on Twitter.

I tweet at least three times a day via two different feeds (different funding sources, different identities & voices, different rules & regulations). This is a treasure trove of activity and information, especially during a Week of Extreme Slow. I took a look at some of the new followers to each feed, and their followers in turn, followed through on some tweets that @mentioned us, and so on. One thing led to another, as they say.

Part of the inbox clean-up involved checking in on my dozens of Google Alerts. I monitor web traffic on the names (and acronyms, and web addresses) of each of our projects, specialized terminology, board members' names, federal grant codes, and more. I've learned to tell a good result from a phantom PDF-chaser. I've disambiguated terms that overlap between our content area and the work, presumably, of some special librarian in another hemisphere whose "LEP" means Local Enterprise Partnerships (not Limited English Proficiency). I've found, cataloged, put in context, and then promoted, hundreds of tiny wisps of information this way. Today I was making sure that each wisp found multiple, strategically-overlapping homes on our website, internal knowledge base, Twitter feed, as well as to see that any mention of us in the press, be it ever so humble, found its way to the communications staff.

The things that didn't make their way off the list were: drafting my "Power of the Hashtag" training for the next SMUG gathering, and putting the finishing touches on a new resource collection on social media and public participation. These will happen, slowly, tomorrow and Friday as I continue in my quest to slow down routine tasks in order to suckle every last bit of learning, productivity, and reflection out of the items on my list.

PS I did all this while listening to Danielle Ate the Sandwich and Neutral Milk Hotel. Great combination.

Passion, Profession, or Practice?

Last year I helped organize a session at our annual conference called, “Social Media and Public Agencies: Practices, Policies, and Potential Pitfalls.” When my boss introduced the session he said, “There must have been a sale on P's.” That goes for this entry as well.

I posted this title as being “On Deck” (see sidebar) a while ago, so obviously this has been on my mind for a while. Here’s what I know: your approach to doing your library job may be a matter of passion, you may consider it a profession, and it may be a deliberate practice (or even all three). Do what works for you, with your unique combination of skills and experience.

As for me, I used to be of the “Follow your passion” mindset, and I was fortunate to have been encouraged and able to do so. I went to grad school (the first time) to become a linguist, which I’ve written about here in the past. I still love the "Follow your passion" conversation--and it builds nicely on my interest in Daniel Pink’s work--but following my passion did not work out for me professionally.

When I entered library school, I found my profession. No matter what positions we hold at any given time, we are part of a community of librarians, and never is that community as strong and important as when you’re starting a new job or flying solo at an old one. You can reach out to others in the profession for guidance, as well as to enhance or maintain your skills when you're looking for work. We are also bound by a code of ethics. That makes this much more than a job. But is it a passion?

In September I had an exhilarating convergence of heroes when JD Roth posted a video of Mike Rowe (also in sidebar) that I sent him and wove it into a great piece called The War on Work. I highly recommend spending some time reading this, comments included. Although I had sent the video to Dan Pink simultaneously, he didn’t post it on his site but he got mentioned a lot in the comments over at Get Rich Slowly. Many people shared their thoughts and feelings about where school, work and interests had taken them, and what this has to do with satisfaction. It was in processing those comments that I solidified my belief that thriving as an embedded librarian is not a passion, nor does it have to be.

My passion is music, not librarianship. If we devised some metric we could prove this beyond any doubt. I used to just consume music, but now that I’m creating some, I see it as a practice above all else (the passion part just makes my fingers hurt less). And since I’ve taken the Happiness Project approach to my work now, librarianship seems more like a practice, too. Clay Shirky writes in Cognitive Surplus that, “Competence is a moving target.” So don’t get too comfortable. Keep practicing.

My Embedded Librarianship Project

Have you ever been too tired to take your contact lenses out at night, and so you stay up even later to avoid doing it? I have. Allow me to explain what this has to do with embedded librarianship.

At some point last year I became passively aware of a person named Gretchen Rubin who had written a book called The Happiness Project. Without knowing too much about it, I decided it was way too sappy for my tastes and I duly avoided learning more about it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being happy. Much of this blog is devoted to my own reflections on how to be happy at work. But I thought (without thinking too hard) that I would probably hate a book called The Happiness Project and that I would gain little by learning about its author.

Around the same time, I was “getting religion” about my debt by reading Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog about how people behave with money (as opposed to how money behaves in the stock market, for example). Something about JD Roth’s insistence that money management is a daily personal exercise—not a philosophy, as I used to ignorantly believe—led back to Gretchen Rubin, both literally and figuratively. I discovered a whole online network of bloggers devoted to Goals, Accountability, Money, Stuff and Time that includes Rubin, Roth, Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta, Courtney Carver and many others. (And they sometimes use capital letters to indicate how much mental energy we spend on things like "Stuff".) While I was still hesitant to check out Rubin’s book, I started following her blog. And that has made all the difference.

Rubin writes about happiness. And just as JD Roth’s exemplary daily writings on personal finance don’t launch readers into shame, blame, and angst at the very thought, Rubin’s daily tips and practical suggestions are indisputably helpful. Most importantly, she is not sappy. Just watch one video of hers and you will know what I’m talking about. She popularized the notion that making one’s bed every day results in greater happiness. (I dare you to try it for a week.)

I admire Rubin for consistently pointing out that everyone’s happiness project will look different. I am now reading the book, and I realized that I started something of a happiness project three years ago when I started this blog. It was initially a way for me to document my adventures “working in the white spaces of the organizational chart.” But what sustained this project was my realization that I am collecting work habits, productivity resolutions, and other heretofore well-kept secrets about flying solo as a new librarian.

Embedded Librarianship projects based on The Happiness Project will have as much diversity and variability as the librarians undertaking them. Every Wednesday is “Tip Day” on The Happiness Project blog, so I naturally think about each week’s tip on Wednesday nights while I am blogging. That’s what works for me. One week the tip was to try a “boot camp” approach to an activity you’ve been dragging your feet on. I used this to jump start the cataloging I had been avoiding for so long. (Yes! Catalog for an entire day to get yourself rolling.)

Today’s tip is to hold yourself accountable. While Rubin uses a Resolutions Chart to do it, I’m a big fan of to-do lists. (And as for my personal finance journey, I have a small, unavoidable copy of my financial goals in my wallet.)

Gretchen Rubin, like me, sings every morning.

Recently I considered Rubin's suggestion to try a Week of Extreme Nice, and I was already thinking of how to adapt this to the workplace. I decided that I would try a Week of Extreme Slow. Once when I was rehearsing for a play, the director had me practice my monologue at an ultra-slow pace for an entire week to focus on the emotion in each syllable, pause and facial expression. I think of this as an analogy to trying a Week of Extreme Slow at work, which will enable me to document the procedures I use, give more concentration to library tasks that I tend to lazily breeze through, and ask in-depth questions about the complexities of our work that I have never understood. A word of caution, though: You definitely need to pick the right week to do a Week of Extreme Slow without falling behind.

What would your library happiness project look like? There are little picky things in mine that are geared toward ending some bad habits (kind of like Rubin’s resolution to take her contacts out before she gets too tired.) I am also trying to incorporate more pro-active, positive measures, such as having a tech tip on my white board that people will see when they walk into my office. Another concrete step I’ve mentioned here is to start telling your colleagues about SLA annual conference as soon as you register. This way (ideally) they will be more interested in what you’ve learned there once you return. Let me know in the comments what your project would be like. And keep smiling.

Why Blogs Die

“There’s never an egg timer around when you need one.” ~The American President

Last September I wrote about professional blog projects. I suggested that they are often conceived to keep up with proverbial Joneses, and also that they are doomed to failure absent careful planning and consideration. I was not wrong, but I understand the problem better this week. Blogs die for the very same reason they are born: it’s so easy.

In his new book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky begins by laying out a simple, captivating summary of the history of American book publishing—one I’d have been glad to have at my disposal during my History of the Book course. To introduce the larger context of his argument, Shirky frames publishing in economic terms. Pre-Gutenberg, books were prohibitively expensive to reproduce in volume. Post-Gutenberg, the folks who owned the means of production still had such a sizable burden to shoulder that their job became a matter of both selecting and producing written texts for readers (not to mention promoting said works to said audiences). This is, needless to say, no longer the case in the world of new media Shirky shepherds us through in his (excellent) book.

Both the beauty and the curse of a blog project in its infancy is the lack of accountability. The barriers to “entry,” or publishing, do not include the time and expense of a print publisher or even the US Postal Service. These are accountability measures, with their own inherent deadlines, that we set up for ourselves in professional budgets to bind ourselves to the organizational mailings of old. We could be pushed through our own hoops by the beneficial entrapments we set up for ourselves by saying, “Let’s do a newsletter,” and then carrying out the various stages of that process. Blogging requires no such advance planning. Though, as I continue to believe, it would be all the better for it.

Blogging also confuses the lines between production and promotion for staff who think it's just a matter of pixilating a newsletter. Organizations can fall prey to thinking the two are similar simply because a blog is online, and that, “If you build it, they will come.” Organizational blogging may have to be a team effort, and the voice of the author--whether co-created or not--might be separate from the voice of the promoter. (Hint: This is also true of print, but somehow it doesn't cause as much confusion in the print medium.)

As expected, the would-be bloggers I cautioned not to promote themselves before producing a certain amount of content have been dormant for a number of months. But since I am not here to complain, I will offer a solution as opposed to an I Told You So.

Why blogs die is not the same as why blogs fail. I do not even know if a blog can fail, but anything is possible. Blogs are easily born, but even more easily reborn. As once proven here, a blog can be resurrected with very little initial effort, in terms of the technology. A project team need only revisit its original goals, division of labor, timeline, and promotional strategy to live again in the blogosphere. Whether it’s your own blog or someone else’s, think of the new year as a time to reboot. Keep blogging.

Tag, You're It.

Well.

This post was originally going to be called "End of an Era," but not only was that already used for several articles on the topic at hand, The End is not as certain as it seemed last Thursday.

Long story short: A Yahoo! meeting slide that showed Delicious as one product to be axed was leaked last Thursday on Twitter and the rest... Let's just say it went the way of Internet rumors and then morphed into a scrumptiously unorganized (though not disorganized, thanks to Twitter hashtags like #SaveDelicious) grassroots "campaign" to send Yahoo! a message.

By Friday morning the news was a patchwork of conjecture, export instructions, and lists of alternatives from Amplify to Zukmo. There were premature obits, emotional laments, memorable tweets, bold assertions that we should have seen it coming, or that we shouldn't rely on free food, and a pointed question from the Washington Post: If this many people love Delicious this fiercely, why can't Yahoo! figure out how to make some money off it?

Yahoo! has still not released an official statement. The Delicious blog confirmed that something was going on, but very little in the way of actual information was provided last week, and below are 1,000 words from the Delicious blog today:

As for me, Yes, I traveled through brief devastation, acted the town crier, set up news alerts, and roped Gretchen into a Farewell, Delicious happy hour. Then I calmed down and started reading as much as I could in order to filter fact from fiction.

My tagging reflexes have taken a hit this week...my bookmarklets are like another appendage, and let's just say it's in a sling right now. I haven't bookmarked anything since Thursday because I didn't want to add to my collection (lingering hysteria mixed with a bit of conservatism for the future) and I didn't want to commit to a new service. One upside was that my tendency to tag everything remotely interesting as "TimePermitting" was tempered, so I had to refine my criteria quite a bit for what I truly thought I would read later. (For all those articles, I emailed them to myself using my AddThis toolbar...it made me much more selective and much more likely to read the things I had grabbed.)

I enjoyed the absolute Meta of seeing articles about Delicious tagged in Delicious, which was more fun than Facebook groups protesting Facebook or tweets about Twitter. It showed that this is a community of users whether you like it or not. I felt part of something, and not primarily because we were venting in unison, but because we were sharing: tips, thoughts, and memories.

(And by the way, I saw some funky versions of the Delicious logo...I'm not sure if that was stylistic in nature or maybe intellectual property paranoia, but don't forget you can use Photoshop to find the exact color mix of an image.)

INTJ

"Extroversion: The act of turning outward; the condition of being so turned."
~The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1940)

My mentor Dave Shumaker over at EmbeddedLibrarian.Wordpress posed the following question last week and I can't help but respond: Can introverts succeed as embedded librarians? His answer was a resounding Yes, and mine will be, too.

As is my standard practice, I will start with two disclaimers: (1) I do not claim to have any knowledge of this topic except first-hand knowledge from my own experience; (2) I acknowledge than many people would not consider me introverted. However...

When I read Dave's post last week I stumbled down undergraduate memory lane. In college I did a double major in French and psychology, the latter being somewhat of an afterthought and a major academic challenge for my (then) anti-science brain. The best psych course I took was Tests and Measurement. As things came to pass, I ended up with a job in educational testing before I went to library school--to the delight of my Tests and Measurement professor. In this course we basically ripped apart every reputable test, including the Myers-Briggs (now MBTI), and we learned to think critically about testing in general. I took this a step further and approached every known assessment with skepticism and disdain. Dave's post made me realize that it was high time for me to revisit Myers and Briggs, at least as an exploratory mission to respond to his post. Lo and behold, I am an introvert.

I had started to suspect as much. Dave makes the crucial point that folk definitions of introversion and extroversion are not sufficient; it has more to do with where you find energy and insight. As for me, it's true than when I'm with others I tend to talk a lot (and loudly), but I enjoy spending time alone more than would likely be healthy for a true extrovert. As my neighbors will attest, I prefer to spend my commute reading rather than discussing local politics (although I will be forthright in saying so), and my coworkers will tell you that I have my headphones on whenever I am at my desk, drawing a lot of strength from my own reactions to music.

My "I" score was not as clear-cut as other dimensions, but it would be dangerous to correlate that with a measure of success in embedded librarianship. True, I often speak about "walking around the office asking people what they are working on," which may sound like a behavior tipped toward extroversion, but where do I get the courage to do that sort of thing?

The real "E" in this job has been entrepreneurship. I had very little to build on except my own skills and strengths. There was so little structure that I had to go out and find staff members to collaborate with, and to learn from. But it was in equal part a matter of deep and careful reflection on how to make my way here, what I had the capacity to do, and what would be of service to others. (Service is perhaps another way to view the "outward turning" in the 70-year-old definition of extroversion above.)

It would be interesting to look at correlations between MBTI scores and entrepreneurial activities, as well as "measures of entrepreneurialism" as a characteristic of embedded librarianship.

(Special Edition) My Year in Books: 2010

My book life this year, by the numbers:

I finished 22 books, nine of which were fiction, and 13 non-fiction. Five of these were memoirs, and three were books of short stories. Nine were written by male authors (2 by Kurt Vonnegut), and twelve were written by female authors (4 by Lorrie Moore). One was written by a man and a woman (Your Money or Your Life). I published a review of If We Can Put a Man on the Moon in a trade magazine for transit professionals.

I met one author: Chris Guillebeau. (See photos from the DC stop of his Unconventional Book Tour.) I contacted five authors besides Guillebeau: Marlee Matlin, Lorrie Moore, David Carr, Michael Idov, and Daniel Pink. I heard back from Marlee Matlin, David Carr, and Daniel Pink (and Michael Idov reTweeted me – does that count?).

THE BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2010 are:

(Fiction) The Help by Kathryn Stockett and Ground Up by Michael Idov; and

(Non-Fiction) The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell and Lessons in Becoming Myself by Ellen Burstyn.

Here is the entire list:

(*=highly recommended)

1. I’ll Scream Later by Marlee Matlin

2. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

3. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell*

4. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore*

5. If We Can Put a Man on the Moon by Bill Eggers and John O’Leary

6. Like Life by Lorrie Moore

7. Emergence by Steven Johnson

8. The Help by Kathryn Stockett*

9. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore

10. Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

11. Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

12. The Night of the Gun by David Carr*

13. Lessons in Becoming Myself by Ellen Burstyn*

14. Anagrams by Lorrie Moore

15. Ground Up by Michael Idov*

16. Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez*

17. Cleaving by Julie Powell

18. The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau

19. The Case for Books by Robert Darnton

20. Drive by Daniel Pink

21. A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

22. Lucky by Alice Sebold*

Some of the books burning a whole on my shelf for 2011 include Your Money: The Missing Manual, There Will Be Rainbows, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Sundown Towns and The Happiness Project. Stay tuned.

Ten Weeks to Prepare and Ten Seconds to Tweet

When I was in library school, wading through Bopp & Smith's tome on reference, I read something about the responsibility of the public librarian to "index the community." It was a passage about how a librarian fulfills a role much like that of a hotel concierge in some communities. This phrase stuck with me, likely because when I was in high school planning my majors in French and communications (one of which came to fruition)--loving learning the ins and outs of Chicago city blocks--I wanted to be a concierge when I grew up.

While I do love showing DC visitors the best pizza place and tea shop in town, I became a librarian, not a concierge, but I'd like to think I still do my best to "index the community," whatever that community may be in my small special library. One of my favorite ways I have succeeded in doing this is to run the Twitter feed for our annual conference. You may think this is a no-brainer, but let me tell you how to do a bang-up job of it as a special librarian and make yourself indispensable in the process.

We had a "gently used" conference feed from the previous year hanging around. About ten weeks prior to the conference I was offered the reins and the password. Unlike some conference Twitter feeds where the username indicates the date/year of the event, this one was general enough that we could reuse it once we rebranded the profile with the new conference locale, logo, conference dates and themes.

I looked up the Visitor & Convention Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, and local media outlets in our destination city, followed their feeds, and looked to see who they were following. I also found a number of feeds from restaurants near the convention center, and from big attractions like the aquarium and museums that conference attendees might want to visit during free slots. I tweeted for a while as the conference before doing much promotion of the feed, which I highly recommend.

When I had a rich feed going, I worked with other staff to have a link to the conference Twitter page in all the marketing pieces we were using leading up to the big event. This included our website, Facebook page, and correspondence with people who had already registered. When people completed their registration in Cvent, a link to the Twitter feed would appear with the phrase "Get conference updates on Twitter!"

For a few weeks I would tweet three times a day, mixing the announcements to have a good combination of logistical information for people who had already registered, and tweeting the allure of our conference subject matter with strategic hashtags. I looked up the speakers slotted for various sessions, and the sponsors for conference events, and found their Twitter feeds. At this point I was getting great use of the mention feature, which led to a lot of followers. (Much of what goes on in Twitter operates on the vanity principle, and there is no shame in that.)

When we were a couple weeks out I worked with the webmaster to get a demo of the Twitter feed on our home page so we would know how it would look. It took a little bit of code to upgrade the standard widget so it would include both manual and automatic retweets, and we were glad we had started early. Three days before the conference started we went live with the new page, and then I had to really keep up the tweets (which by this point were about weather, schedule changes, and last ditch efforts to get more registrants).

Then the fun really began. I was running around the convention center for a week posting fliers about the feed in strategic places, handing out stickers for people to display their usernames on the official conference badge, and switching between two Blackberrys as I ran the official feed and a separate feed for one of the pre-conference meetings. Conference organizers were great about announcing me if I was live-tweeting a session so attendees could jump on board, mention us, and have us mention them. I was also taking a lot of pictures and tweeting those.

While I was in sessions it occurred to me that my broad knowledge of the organization, a good lock on who's who in the field, my ability to think fast and know a good soundbite when I hear one, and the discretion required when anything mildly political spills into the soundbites--those library skills enhanced each and every tweet. And hey, the local Greek restaurant started following us and then offered free appetizers to any attendee with a badge from our conference!

After the conference I was asked to give a presentation on how all this came together and I talked about the 700+ messages we had generated as a way of codifying our institutional knowledge, our impact on the field, and our outreach to new stakeholders by putting ourselves and our issues into the Twitterverse.

Librarians with "Issues"

I found that by looking at the white spaces on the organization chart--the gaps between jobs, where no else had responsibility--that there were new job opportunities, like building an intranet, starting a corporate university, creating a daily business intelligence report, that needed to be done. As it turned out, sometimes I was promoted into a job and sometimes I was promoted because I created the job that needed doing. ~Susan Fifer Canby

Two posts over at Gypsy Librarian have gotten me thinking about librarians, neutrality, and advancing issues beyond information organization and literacy. The specific issues Angel addresses (LGBT suicide, for example) are ones that arise in his context, not mine, but the topic is a good one for embedded librarians. The closest I have come in this forum to advancing any "issues" was when I wrote that modeling good reading habits should not be outside the domain of the special librarian, even in a corporate setting. Let's start there.

Information literacy in our specialty is certainly within our scope. This is without question, and general information literacy or search strategy is a natural offshoot of that topic. These are all "safe" issues for us to get behind. Taking on web accessibility can be a bit risky, and very difficult, but it falls very naturally within a librarian's scope of responsibility and influence. What about other issues? The farther into the white spaces we move, the more complicated it becomes, and the more opportunities there are for advancing important issues.

I found myself being the cheerleader for Census 2010 in our office--both in terms of encouraging our stakeholders to be counted and in terms of what the results will mean for our work--and I did a lot of good by sticking with it. I recently took on a voluntary research project about Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and what it has to do with transit agencies' outreach, and this has been productive and praised as well. There are also the innocuous issues that I take on, like partnerships between libraries and transit agencies, that may or may not bear fruit and probably won't offend anyone along the way.

Whatever the topic may be, we are sure to do more good, create better job security, and get greater satisfaction from our work, by following the issues rather than hiding from them.

On Writing Fan Letters

I am thankful for good books to read, time to read, and the freedom to read.

Last year at this time I discovered Lorrie Moore. That's her, at left, in the irresistible photo I had on my Twitter page for a long time until I gave into my music cravings again and changed the backdrop. Although I'd had the same favorite book for almost twenty years, once I found Lorrie Moore there was no going back. I read all her stuff in four months and decided I could have two favorite books. Now (and possibly forever), Lorrie Moore is my favorite writer.

In February, when I decided that Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? was worthy of sitting beside The Pigman each time I answer the Favorite Book question, I decided I ought to tell Lorrie about it. It has been my standard practice for a while to write fan letters when someone's creation moves me. Normally I do not experience much pressure during the process (except to find the right address) but this was different: writing to my favorite writer. About writing.

I spent about two weeks agonizing over how to express myself, and how to talk about the way Frog Hospital had affected me. I didn't want to come off as a presumptuous intellectual (like the kind who would attempt to shorten her title as in an industry write-up). Then one evening I reread her short story Go Like This and in the middle of that night it hit me--a voice in my head repeated, "Just tell her you like her." I got up and wrote two pages to her about how much I like her writing, and asked her to keep doing it. It was an emotional outpouring that I refined over a couple of days before sending, cleverly disguising it in a way that was *sure* to get it delivered to her University of Wisconsin office. It's one of my best pieces of writing.

When I finished Cartwheels in a Sari I wrote a fan letter to Jayanti Tamm, and she wrote back! We ended up organizing a DCPL event together for her book tour, and I've recently corresponded with her about how to get my own novel published. When I wrote to David Carr to tell him how often I refer people to his article on Why Twitter Will Endure, he wrote me back the sweetest message. I've written to dozens of journalists to thank them for particularly well-researched and well-written articles, and they often reply to thank me, and sometimes to say I've made their day. (Hint: Tell celebrities you are a librarian; they love that.)

Writing fan letters is an act of thanksgiving. It's often the only way to calm the gratitude--yes, gratitude--that spins inside me when I read, see, or hear something beautiful. Do you know that feeling? When something is done so well that you have to tell someone? Tell the creator. Write a fan letter.

*Results Not Typical

I finally finished Daniel Pink's Drive after a long, interrupted reading that began this summer. Since Pink went to the trouble of providing a "Twitter Summary" of his book, I will reproduce it here: Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.

He also provides a discussion guide. For me, the most intriguing question in it was, "Pink draws a distinction between “routine” work and “nonroutine” work. How much of your own work is routine? How much is nonroutine?" While my attitude toward the lack of structure in my job oscillates wildly, one thing is clear: I have autonomy. I believe that many of the successes I've blogged about are directly traceable to the very high level of autonomy given to me by my employer in general, and by my supervisor in particular. This may render my advice useless to those who have fewer options in their libraries or organizations, but it's a nice applied study of Pink's ideas. Most of my work would fall into the "nonroutine" category.

My primary project is conducted through a federal cooperative agreement which outlines discrete quantitative deliverables for the library: items added to the events calendar, publications announced as being added to our holdings, and print resources disseminated by staff at events around the country. These tasks are routine. They also take a maximum of 90 minutes per week (on average), and perhaps another 90 minutes at the end of the quarter to report on them. Coding web pages would also likely fall under "routine," except that each page requires a sufficient amount of creativity. And replacing complex code (which I generally refer to as "surgery") takes so much concentration, at least for me, that the routine aspect of it is overshadowed by the caution required.

The rest of my work is nonroutine by Pink's definition: "Creative, conceptual, right-brain work that can't be reduced to a set of rules." I was acting as de facto marketing specialist on one project for a while and came up with a bunch of good ideas for promotional items. I've been working on "blog empowerment" lessons for a set of independent contractors who write (somewhat reluctantly) for us from the field. I was searching for a penguin costume. At times I have blogged about these adventures, and other times I got so carried away with my nonroutine work that I didn't want to stop to document it. Suffice it to say that the creativity and autonomy I have for most of my work have led to great, and perhaps atypical results.

So, what can you do about it? Last week I wrote about how this blog is becoming more about effective work habits than embedded librarianship. If your work is largely routine, figure out a way to do it more effectively. I know this doesn't always mean Faster, but it may pave the way for more nonroutine work in your future.

Revisiting Web Accessibility

“Accessibility is not a box to tick; it is a call to action.”

~ Richard Hulse

In the past few months I have realized that this blog is more about effective work habits than embedded librarianship. I'll take it. After all, the whole of life is not so much about what you know, but what you repeat. It takes effective work habits to put into practice everything I learned in library school. One thing I learned was to be user-focused, and this includes focusing on the needs of users with disabilities.

It's been about two years since I was studying and speaking about web accessibility in a significant way, but I always try to make it part of my work here. Some of the main principles--especially if you frame the issue as "universal design"--remain constant: make your technology (information technology or otherwise) easier for everyone to use. But a lot of the details change and, as with all things tech, we have to keep up.

Today I reread a lot of the great web accessibility resources that have been gathering dust in my sidebar. I was reminded of the unique role of librarians in advancing the issue of web accessibility, because of our special place at the intersection of information technology and outreach to underserved populations. I installed the Firefox add-on for accessibility, and I ran a few of our social media tools through an online accessibility check. Now I just have to figure out how to interpret our Twitter report card (below).

One of the things I read gave a description of web accessibility that just sounds like a good habit in general: "Give all users more options and control when accessing web resources and support the interoperability concepts of the web." How do we make it happen? The same way we do everything else:

• Know your users. We recently started rolling out an online magazine to replace the print version. We did a lot of "ground softening" for older, less tech-savvy users. If we have a good sense of which parts of our web content present challenges to users with disabilities (Do we? Jury's still out.), then we should be able to help all users through the transition.
  
  
• Plan ahead. Have you checked your site for keyboard-only navigation? This is a key piece of web accessibility that could fall through the cracks during project management if you don't plan ahead--just like everything else that falls through the cracks if you don't plan ahead.
  
  
• Work together. It's hard to be a one-man-band/one-woman-choir on web accessibility, or on any issue for that matter. You need to recruit allies.

If you are slow to start, or don't know where to start with web accessibility, I recommend reading the first few sections of Dive Into Accessibility, which gives great profiles of real users with disabilities--users who are much more colorful characters than just Jane Doe with a screenreader. These profiles remind you of the complexity of ability and disability, and of the human beings trying to access your web content.

These Things Take Time

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

~ The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I've been thinking a lot about New Year's resolutions. When January 1 rolls around I want to be able to commit to three priorities for 2011. It will take me a while to settle on a list that I am likely to be successful with. As part of the process I am reviewing where most of my resolve has settled in 2010, and while it's not critical to discuss what they are (okay, okay, they are bike empowerment, money management, and music), the larger point is that they are all things that had to be built up slowly over time, rather than discrete events or accomplishments.

One of the laws I have discovered is that most things operate this way: gradually, and then suddenly. It's how I got comfortable using a bike instead of a car for grocery shopping, how I finally started learning how to save money, and how I am learning to play guitar. It's also (sometimes) how relationships are destroyed and how people get cancer. Time is the undeniable factor in it all, and I am now branded with the lunar cycle so I never forget it.

Librarianship is not to be crammed for. There are aspects of it that are best applied by quick thinkers through rapid-fire protocols and honed instincts, but doing it well is not something to be achieved overnight. There is a lot of listening and marinating that has to go on for a while before you even have a frame of reference for how things work in your particular organization, and you won't even know what your goals should be for a while.

I would have thought that by now the print library would be a heck of a lot more organized. What have I done with it in three years? Very little, but not because I wasn't paying attention; it's precisely because I was paying attention that I put my efforts elsewhere. I realized that people don't really use it, and they are not necessarily going to use it if I make it fancy or put out a candy dish. I realized that the job is not necessarily as originally described because a job description is always a somewhat artificial construct.

I would like to think that some of what I am learning is transferable, but it is also quite specialized. Each organization is different, and delving into the differences is what makes you an asset: How does it work here? What does this mean in our context? You can ask these questions all you want in your first two years (and a ton of other questions), but there are all these other subtle and unspoken things that you'll glean, and Time seems to be the only dispenser of these particular pearls of wisdom.

So be patient. With yourself, your staff and your organization. These things take time.

Wikipedia and Me: It's Kind of a Long Story

When I was in fourth grade I was double-promoted to fifth grade. This practice, commonly known as "skipping a grade," while lauded in some circles, did nothing but exaggerate the social misfittedness of my adolescence (which was later corrected when I went to library school). My first day of fifth grade was October 27, 1986, and every year on this day I reflect on the relative worth of that move.

I don't believe in entering into the dicey calculus of what might have been, but I do believe the whole grade-skipping affair launched me into a life of know-it-all-itude. It didn't take me all the way 'til library school to correct that one, though. That one flew out the window during my Peace Corps experience, and whatever was left after that evaporated when I took on a humbling masters program in linguistics that was my most challenging academic undertaking. (I did finish, but not with flying colors).

At one point during my first graduate school adventure, I attended a meeting of a student environmental group that was using some weird thing called a "wiki" to organize its content and calendars. This was 2003, and to put this in proper historical context, imagine that Arnold Schwarzenegger had just been elected Governor of California---during a World Series playoff game in which the Cubs scored 8 runs. (I was there, and it's one of my favorite memories.) I had not yet heard of Wikipedia, and didn't find out about Arnie on it; I heard someone shout it out in the packed corridors of Wrigley Field as heartbroken fans filed out after 11 dizzying innings.

When the leader of our student group said we'd be using a website that anyone could edit, I put my still-thinking-I-knew-it-all hand up and asked how we would control the website if anyone could edit it. His answer was, "The community will govern." Indeed, he was right.

I've never been a very good hater of Wikipedia. I probably made a half-hearted attempt at some point to be one of those librarians who frowns on folk sources, but it never stuck. It's partly because Wikipedia was not my first exposure to a wiki. I got schooled on the wiki ethos long before I went looking for data about the Dixie Chicks when I first saw Shut Up and Sing. I had no doubt I would get a good estimate when I wanted to find out how old Kirby Dick is, and I fully enjoyed reading along about the history of Paranormal Activity while I was watching it. Suffice it to say that outside of IMDB and the print version of People magazine, Wikipedia is my favorite go-to resource on matters of pop culture.

I trust that the people behind the Dixie Chicks entry were at each other's virtual throats to appropriately document all sides of the controversy. But I'm a librarian. People look to me for guidance on reputable sources, and lurking in every conversation or reference question is the notion that there may be a Wikipedia entry leading the way to a bunch of resources, or providing valuable information itself. What's a girl to do?

In my first semester of library school I heard a panel discussion in which one alum proudly announced that she sported an "I hate Google and Wikipedia" T-shirt at the middle school library where she worked. Surely this is not a solution. Later I had a great class in which the professor said, "Wikipedia is a fact of life," and encouraged us to use our library skills to fact-check and improve its articles. That sounds more like it.

Since the Facts of Life lecture, I have come to embrace Wikipedia as more than just a competing resource that my colleagues are tempted to consult before asking me a reference question. I'm coming around to it, and starting to have more courage to speak out about it. Several experiences have made this possible. One was hearing Cory Doctorow speak at ALA this summer. He said something along the lines of, "How many major newspapers alert you that an article has incomplete citations or contains information that's currently being debated?"

Another turning point for me was reading Daniel Pink's account of Wikipedia's creation in his book Drive, and reflecting on the importance of this in explaining new theories of human motivation. A third experience was reading Chris Guillebeau's manifesto, in which he laments the days of old media: "People would sit in front of the screen and watch 'the news' presented in a hierarchical fashion based on what a small group of media barons and editors thought was important."

In Guillebeau's "alternative graduate school" proposal, one of the things he recommends it to set your internet browser to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage and read the article that comes up each day. I've been doing this for two weeks and it is both more entertaining and possibly more educational than reading a whole GAO report every month.

One last memory: it was unsettling to say the least when, on the morning of April 16, 2007, I first heard of the Virginia Tech Massacre by reading its Wikipedia page. The page was a single scroll at that point, with a rudimentary timeline and no links. It was set up before major news outlets had picked up the story and was sent to me by a coworker. This was a revealing moment in our history. The lesson here is less technical than sociological: more people are creating and sharing information. And, even though I learned in library school that, "90% of anything is crap," I think having a mass historical record created by many minds is inherently a good thing (especially when it's so well organized).

We should go forward and evaluate Wikipedia articles with the same rigor we would any other resource--no more, no less.