On Expectations

4/1/2014

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So, for a little background to this post, the library where I’m currently working is an unusual one. Mine is an independent high school library that made the huge decision to move to an all-digital model back in 2009, getting rid of most of its print collection and largely restructuring the space itself in the process. The library didn’t lose any significant square footage, but a coffee shop (complete with booths) was installed, along with several free-form, tech-oriented teaching spaces. We still have a couple of stacks and a couple of study rooms, but for the most part our library is a single open space that is very much geared toward socializing. We sit at a crossroads, and serve as a shortcut from one of the main academic buildings to the rest of the campus. We get hundreds of students passing through every day, which is amazing and awesome and sometimes chaotic. The changes made to the library were major and irrevocable -- there’s no going back to what the library used to be, and we are quite different from most other libraries of our type.

One of the lingering challenges I’ve felt in this library is one of expectations. In the eyes of some we are “the Library,” so we are for books, and studying, and quiet; and when we don’t fulfill those expectations -- the library is noisy, the kids are just hanging out or spending time on the computers playing games -- something is “wrong.” (Where the lack of print books is concerned, I sometimes also feel it quite strongly from other librarians, but that might be a subject for another day.) The point is, this library, more than most I’ve known, has been subject to tension concerning what it’s supposed to be and do.


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Coming Back Around

3/25/2014

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My pal Turner always told me never to begin a blog post by acknowledging how long it's been since I last posted. But I think there's a point where you kind of have to, and I think I'm well beyond that point now. So, yeah... it's been a while.

Anyway, I've been on the job for about seven months now. As the end of the academic year s-l-o-w-l-y approaches, I think I can begin gathering some thoughts and putting them here. I'll have a real post up by April 1 at the latest.
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Graduation Day

8/18/2013

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Two years of effort culminates today: somewhere in Portland, all of my cohort mates are receiving their MLS degrees, and so, by extension, am I. 

I am not in Portland, however. I moved to Boston back at the beginning of June in the hope of finding more opportunity than Oregon could provide. It was a hard decision. I adore Portland, and I love a lot of people there, but there was just nowhere to go in the librarian job market. Plus, I really didn't relish the idea of directly competing with so many friends for every position that did open up -- I want us all to be happy and prosperous, and not at each others' expense. 

So I came to one of the librarianship capitals of the United States instead. I was giving up a certain amount of hard-earned professional credibility in exchange for more greater opportunity. I used a practicum at the WGBH Media Library and Archives to leapfrog into the Boston job market, and spent the summer there inventorying, assessing and cataloging tapes of old radio programming. I started applying for any position that seemed managable -- lots of paraprofessional work, and a few proper librarian jobs. I never heard a peep from any of them. Around the end of July I began to seriously worry that I had made the wrong decision in throwing myself headlong into an unfamiliar market. Boston is full of opportunity, but it's also full of library students and recent grads, and all from schools that are more highly regarded than mine. 

At the very end of July I stumbled across a job posting for a librarian at a boarding school in central Massachusetts; it wasn't anything I'd ever imagined doing, but it sounded like an amazing job, so I submitted the best cover letter and resume I could muster. Early the next week they called me in for an interview; a week after that, they offered me the job. I got to attend my final capstone weekend with a job offer in hand. That was a pretty great feeling.

So a week from today, I'm moving to a tiny town near the New Hampshire state line to begin a real, honest-to-goodness librarian job. The setting and context is still a bit of a surprise to me, but I foresee a year of really exciting work. But more on that later. 

For now, I'm closing the book on library school, and looking forward to everything that comes next. I am immensely grateful to the many people who helped me get to this point: my mom, for supporting me through yet another round of school; my best friend R. for taking me in while I made the transition to a new city; my friends and professional associates back in Portland; Pierina Parise for being the best den mother a bunch of library school students ever had; and all of my cohort at Emporia State University SLIM-Oregon. 

Onward and upward, friends!


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My, What a Busy Year!

7/17/2012

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This month marks my halfway point through library school. A year ago I was waiting impatiently to begin; a year from now I hope to be wrapping up the final bits of my capstone and hopefully doing some real work somewhere, somehow. I still feel as though I’ve only just begun, which sits in strange juxtaposition with my hopeful anxiety about how soon this process will be coming to an end.

This first year has been great. I managed, with the help of a few key people, to really hit the ground running, with a student job in an amazing academic/medical library as well a professional association board appointment within my first term. I have some incredible, talented classmates, and I work with a team of lovely, knowledgeable, enthusiastic librarians and support staff. I’ve been lucky to have so many people around who are willing to share their experience and expertise with me; it has almost been, dare I say it, worth more than library school itself. (Not really, of course... but also, sort of.)

I wanted to note a few of the cool projects I’ve gotten to work on over the course of this first year. I’ve been a busy little badger, doing my schoolwork, working in the library, and then doing all this other stuff besides:


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Code Tweed: on the Hospital Librarian

1/13/2012

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Part of my weekly duties as a circ assistant at a research hospital/medical school library is to do the book drop run on OHSU's Aerial Tram, which is pretty cool. It's like going on a tiny theme park ride every Friday morning. Anyway, to get to the tram, I walk through the hospital. And the thing about working in a hospital is that you quickly get used to it as a working environment. You're surrounded by doctors and nurses and support staff and so on, and it all becomes pretty routine. Frankly, it's easy to kind of forget that it's a hospital, with all the business that comes along with it -- the sickness, the pain, the anxious families, and sometimes the sadness.

But then, walking through the halls on a routine morning, you might get a jarring reminder.

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What Do We Say to Term 2?

1/9/2012

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My second term starts in a couple of days. Going to be doing some reference stuff, going to be doing some group projects, going to be kicking some ass.
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Look at me, I'm famous!

12/21/2011

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Just a note: I had a guest post about video in the library up at Hack Library School today! Many thanks to those lovely people for giving me a slot on their amazing blog, and thanks to Turner for shepherding me through the process. It's like being asked to sit with the cool kids in the school cafeteria, assuming the cool kids are all library nerds. I feel so accepted!
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Librarian Birthday

12/7/2011

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As of today, it's been a year since I first decided to go to library school. I say "decided" like it was a reasoned, considered choice, but whatever was behind it, it wasn't my rational mind doing the choosing. My friend Turner had been saying to me for years that it was something I should consider, that I would do well in the field, that I would like the work, that I would get a lot out of it. And I kept saying no, no, I don't want to be a librarian. I wasn't sure what I was going to do instead -- I was coming out of fifteen years spent working toward film making and teaching that had gone absolutely nowhere -- but I don't think I ever gave it any serious consideration at all, or at least not on a conscious level.

And yet on December 6, 2010 -- I know the date because it was the day after my birthday -- I woke up with a pressing need to talk to Turner. Something in my mind had decided, without any guidance or input from me, that I was going to go to library school, and I urgently needed to figure out how I was going to do it.

But this post isn't really about that; that's just the back story. This post is about everything that's happened since I made that subconscious, somewhat life-changing decision.


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The WoW approach to library school

11/12/2011

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I came into library school from basically zero: I didn't really know anything about the field, I had no experience working in a library, and apart from a few friends, I didn't have any connections. Not much to start with. But now, barely more than two months later, I'm most of the way through my first term, I've got positions in two professional associations, I have a real job in a real library, and I've made a bunch of connections with librarians both here and in distant states. Solid progress in a short span of time, right?

And I did it all by imagining that everybody I met had an exclamation point floating above their heads.
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Greetings, novice. We need you to organize a speaker for the brown bag luncheon in March. Do you accept?

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How do we solve a problem like Maria?

10/17/2011

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A few days ago I woke up with the song, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" stuck in my head. Weird, right? It just came from nowhere. But maybe it reflects some deeper state of mind. (Probably not, but let's go with it for a minute.)

I spent a day recently at a small conference devoted to online culture. On the surface it looked silly and superfluous -- all LOLcats and post-ironic, meta-nostalgic references to Rick Astley. Everyone had a good time with it, and nobody took it too seriously. But underlying that goofy facade were some serious questions about things like copyright reform, using the Internet and social media to further (or hinder) social change (as in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street), and how we should go about archiving this vast store of information. 

These are the questions to which I am most drawn at this stage of my novice librarianship. I mean, how do we archive the Internet? And for that matter, how do we make sense of the knowledge it contains? How might we organize it to make it useful in the future? Librarianship is predicated on the idea of taking information held in relatively tidy packages and organizing it; so how do we extend our skills to the messy, feral information that inhabits the digital world? 

I honestly think about that a lot. The problem I have is that at this stage, I still have trouble telling the difference between the questions that have answers that I just haven't seen within my first two months of study, and the questions that are questions for everybody. When I have these questions, should I be patient in the hope that all will become clear with a few more classes, or do I go out and start digging around in the murky swamps of librarianship? I have mostly tried to do the latter, but when the questions are big ones, sometimes it's hard even to know whom I should ask. 

Anyway, I went to this conference to see a couple of people specifically: Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, and Jason Scott of textfiles.com (and also, of late, of the Internet Archive.) These two people, one librarian and one not, are out wayfinders through this wilderness, having begun the work of sorting through these questions. Most of what they've accomplished has been simple preservation -- culling huge quantities of information off of the Internet and storing it away for future use. No cataloging, no organizing beyond the barest essentials, just acquisition and storage. Apparently the entire history of the Internet fits inside a standard shipping container. When asked how the Internet Archive catalogs its collection, Kahle answered, "we don't. We leave that for others." And some 200 institutions have put together roughly 2500 collections from the Archive, though that barely scratches the surface of the information contained therein. One of the biggest challenges the Archive has faced has been dealing with video files -- with no single standard format, it has been a constant battle to keep their video files in an accessible, usable state. When one format becomes obsolete or falls out of use, they update everything to a new format. And this is done only to make sure that in five years people will still be able to view that file, much less 50, or 100, or 500. And certainly that doesn't include really understanding what that material contains. 

I think this work is going to be absolutely pivotal in the coming decades; I almost want to say that librarianship could stand or fall on how it tackles these questions. And yet the more I play around with them, the more it seems that nobody currently has a really strong grasp on them. I see some really interesting ideas going around, but if librarians are the ship captains on the sea of information, then the Internet is the ocean which we are only just learning how to sail. 

I think about this a lot because this is the sort of thing that I know we won't cover in library school, so if I'm going to work on it, it's up to me to tackle it on my own. I don't know if this is where I'm headed long-term, or whether it's just the shiny thing that currently has my attention. But I do enjoy a big question. 
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