the future
By - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 9:11am
I love being a librarian.
Some of it is because of the big picture/honorable professional stuff that I frequently blog about here. But honestly, I really love the day to day: staffing a ref desk, hunting down a hard to find piece of information, working with law students…Not only do I never wake up in the morning dreading going into work, but I often am really looking forward to it.
So it is with very mixed emotions that I announce that very soon I will no longer be a librarian.
At least not the kind that works in a library.
If I’m timing this right, John Mayer, the executive director of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has just announced that starting August 15, I will be the new Director of Content Development for CALI. This is definitely an unexpected and unplanned development in my career, but one that I couldn’t be more excited and thrilled about. It’s not every day that you’re offered a job that will give you the opportunity to change the world and, knowing some of the projects that CALI is working on and the possibilities of what it can do, well….I really think we can make a difference. Definitely in the way future lawyers are educated, but also in how regular citizens have access to justice and legal materials.
When John offered me the job, he was almost like a combination of Morpheus in The Matrix and The Godfather.
My new boss, John Mayer, at CALIcon Vegas
I realized that I could continue on my safe library career path, enjoying my job and wishing some things in the legal information landscape would be different OR I could take a bit of a leap of faith, alter my plans and spend my time actually making the products I think are needed instead of waiting for them to happen. As you’ve probably noticed, Gentle Reader, I really like quotes. One of my all time favorites is from Ghandi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I really think this position will allow me to do that. And, in the end, that was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Although I am not going to be working in a library, I still will always consider myself to be a librarian. I’m just literally putting my money where my mouth is when it comes to all of my talk about how libraries and librarians should work and collaborate with technologists and other related fields. It’s definitely going to be a different environment and the new freedoms I’ll have to create and explore are a little breathtaking. The CALI crew are also just a lot of fun to be around. As I told John after I accepted the offer, I feel a little bit like I’m running away and joining the circus.
So, this is a big step. It’s exciting and scary and, yes, even makes me just a little sad. I’m sure there’s a German word that encapsulates all of these emotions. But you know, I have always believed that life is meant to be lived to fullest and that you should try new things and take big risks – otherwise you’re just taking up space and counting down the clock until you die. And that’s such a sad waste of a life. I dunno…maybe I was the only kid that was actually listening when they read that Robert Frost poem at graduation.
This isn’t just a big professional step, but a personal one too. I’ll be moving to Chicago, which is slightly different from Valparaiso, Indiana. You know, just a little. So I’m also very excited about the opportunities for adventure that living there is going to provide. I’m a bit of a country mouse, so I am a little nervous, but in my house hunting adventures I have already learned the secret to driving in Chicago: Don’t think about your insurance premiums and just gun it. Which I guess is sort of the theme here.
So. Lots of changes happening in the next month. My last day at Valparaiso is going to be July 29 and I would be remiss if I didn’t also include a big THANK YOU to all of my colleagues here who have been so much fun and valuable to work with. I am so sad about leaving them and this beautiful place.
But…now on to a new adventure.
CALI, hve, LibPunk, meta, open access, the future
By - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 8:57pm
(Part One of this two part series appears here)
I recently attended “The Future of Law Libraries: The Future is Now?” workshop hosted by the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Even though it was only one day, there were too many things discussed for me to adequately cover in this post. Fortunately, John Palfrey, host with the most and Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School live blogged the proceedings here. The event was also video recorded and tweeted – you can find those media as well as other relevant materials on the program’s website.
Although the program was about “the future”, for me the day was almost a master class in the history of American law libraries. So many greats of the profession were there, either on the program or in attendance – the names of which I’m not even going to attempt to list out of fear of missing someone, but you know who I mean. Which brings me to theme one of the day, which I tried to emphasize in my portion of the program…
I like talking to more experienced librarians. Obviously, there’s the “not taught in books” skill sharing one can get – for example, the best way to wake up a suspicious looking patron that’s sleeping or possibly dead in your reading room. But honestly, a lot of those you learn on the job from your more experienced co-workers. What I really enjoy is hearing the more social stories from them, when Great Names and Institutions have a more human face put on them. And it’s not to say that these stories aren’t professionally valuable. It’s usually within these stories that one learns about the previous issues and controversies that consumed librarians in the past.
One thing that I have found lacking in both my legal and library educations is the enculturalization that other academic disciplines get in their graduate education programs. As I unfortunately phrased it to the traditional teaching faculty participants during my Cambridge retreat, “You guys are lucky – you’re taught to be academics.” Um, that did not go over well. Score one for the famous Sarah Glassmeyer Charm.
Here’s what I mean: for example, my sister holds a Ph.D. in environmental chemistry. (She works for the government, though, not in academia.) During her graduate education, she worked closely with an advisor and a group of co-advisees. Adorably, such relationships are often referred to as academic parents and academic siblings. There’s also cousins and grandparents….and chemists, at least, are able trace back their lineage from advisor to advisee several hundred years. Every year at the big chemistry nerd conference, her advisor has a dinner for all of his current and former advisees. The total effect of this is that when they enter professional life, they have a fully formed professional and social network (the original kind – not the poke/throw sheep at each other kind) waiting for them. And it is also though this close advisor/advisee relationship that a newer graduate student can begin to learn the history of and behaviors appropriate to their specific discipline.
Contrast that to either law or library science. The law school experience is not appreciably different for those going into academia, practice or an alternate career. And MLS programs? They too have little delineation based on future careers and more often than not feel like a trial similar to getting a union card rather than an opportunity for the creation of professionals, let alone academic professionals..
So, what to do? Of course there are programs such as University of Washington and Arizona which have MLS programs with law library concentrations and I assume cover some of this, but not everyone can go there and for some of us, that horse long ago left the barn. It would be nice for there to be formal programs offered by professional organizations or libraries – such as the retreat I went to with my coworkers or this Harvard workshop day – to fill in some of these gaps. The newer librarian is also going to have to take some initiative to find these things out for themselves. But, speaking as a newer librarian, it’s hard to know what you don’t know until you realize you don’t know it.
For example, mixed in with all the names I recognized at the Future of Law Libraries event were some names I didn’t quite recognize. So I googled them. The professional biography of one made me yell, “Oh SHIT.” at my computer. PROTIP: Not all of the Great Names and Pioneers have their name on a legal research casebook nor do they have a giant neon sign over their head that says, “I’ve been doing awesome things since before you were a twinkle in your father’s eye so listen up.” I suppose I should have taken their presence at the workshop as a sign that they were someone important, but then again I was there and I’m, well…me.
I don’t know that I have a perfect solution, but I am now collaborating on a scheme that will hopefully alleviate some of the ignorance that younger librarians such as myself have about the history of our profession as well as preserve it before it’s too late. Rich Leiter had the idea of creating a StoryCorps-like collection of law librarian tales and together we will hopefully make this happen. We want to record short (~5 minute) stories about the people, places and events that have shaped the present and will shape the future of law libraries. So stay tuned to hear more about that as details emerge.
There were two other strong themes through the day: (1) Libraries can’t act alone, and (2) in the future, we’re going to look back at many present controversies and wonder what the big deal was. One of the things that I really appreciated about the day was that the speaker list wasn’t composed of all law librarians – there were technologists, teaching faculty (both from law and other disciplines) and other types of library administrators. (Although it was not as diverse as it could have been. See Greg Lambert’s critique – which I agree with – here.) The law library world cannot remain insular and hope to survive. There are projects that libraries can and should collaborate on and, frankly, some really great ideas to steal.
This is such an exciting time for legal information…the time is foreseeable that no longer will a limited number of companies control the publication legal materials. I don’t just mean primary law. A second front in the Free Law War is opening up with the open publication of secondary materials such as journals and casebooks. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses.’” The relative ease of electronic publishing means that there are people and organizations out there that are looking to find solutions beyond “faster horses” and creating something more sophisticated and creative than just an electronic copy of a traditional print resource. Libraries and librarians must choose to work with them and lend their expertise to these endeavors or be left behind.
So that’s really just a brief glimpse at what was such a personally and professionally rewarding day. I’m very grateful to John Palfrey and the organizers for inviting me to attend and participate in the event. I’m hopeful that some of the conversations that we started at Harvard will continue on into the future and I’m very excited to see what sorts of things the future will hold.
By - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 8:49pm
Gentle Reader, I have had an amazing few weeks.
The first part I’m almost embarrassed to write about because I am so ridiculously fortunate to have participated in it. My employer sends all new faculty members (yes, including librarians!) to a week long retreat to spend time talking about our first year experiences and what it means to be a faculty member. And I don’t mean that we talked about classroom management techniques or the daily grind of faculty life. We talked about things like the purpose and history of higher education, shaping minds vs. shaping character, and whether we felt education was a vocation. And oh yeah, and they sent us to Cambridge, England to do it.
I KNOW, RIGHT???
It wasn’t a total cakewalk…actually it was a pretty intense week. I’ve taken graduate level courses that required less reading than what we had to do to prepare for this retreat. As much work as it was, I finished the week feeling more energized and excited about the future. There really was too much covered to go over it all point by point, but for my own personal memory at least, I am going to record one bit of it here.
We started off the week by all of us going around the room and answering three questions: (1) How did you end up in academic life? (2) What do you feel is the point of your work?, and (3) Do you think your job is a vocation? The first part is easy enough to answer: my career is a total accident. I really didn’t want to practice law, but I also didn’t want to waste the time I had spent in law school. Fortunately, one afternoon I wandered into Rick Goheen’s office (at the time a librarian at University of Cincinnati College of Law, now director at the University of Toledo) – not to ask a question, but to get some candy that I knew he always kept on his desk – and noticed that he happened to have a law degree and a master of library science hanging on his wall. I thought, “well, maybe I’ll do that.”
Office art and candy: It can change lives.
Accident though it may be, I think this life in legal information has worked out pretty well. I mean, it’s only been five years, but so far so good. I find it intellectually stimulating, I’m able to work on social justice issues (which were what drew me to law school in the first place, although I don’t work on the same ones or in the same way as I would as a practicing attorney obviously) and, I don’t know….it just fits. I also love working in education. There’s something very satisfying about taking complex subjects and making them accessible and easy (well, easier) to understand.
The third question is also easy for me to answer. I really and truly believe that librarians are going to save the world. The librarian is one of the great professions, up there with doctors and lawyers and clergy and politicians (stop laughing) – professions that classically have worked for the betterment of society and humankind. We are uniquely poised in this time of information upheaval to guide others and navigate through unfamiliar territory, but do so with an appreciation for and knowledge of the past and can ensure nothing gets lost along the way. I believe access to information is a fundamental human right and librarians (with assists from some new partners) are pretty much the only thing standing in the way of large corporations and even governments from infringing on those rights. So, yes, I am proud and excited and even a little humbled to call myself a librarian and I do consider it to be a vocation. That’s why I’m so obnoxious about so many issues related to information science and commerce.
The second question is where things start to get a little dicey. To be a librarian is to be pulled in a 1000 directions at once. I’ve been struggling this past year with managing my interests and figuring out where to concentrate my energies. I really hate to do things poorly and I was in definite danger of becoming a jack of all trades and master of none. Things are sorted now, but, ironically enough, this post is not the time to talk about *my* future. There will be plenty of time for that later.
So, for the tl;dr crowd: I went to England, thought deep thoughts and have a real excitement about the future because I now have an understanding and appreciation of the past. Also, being a librarian rules. All of which was a perfect set up for attending the Future of Law Libraries workshop held at Harvard the week after I got back. You can read about it here, in part two.
Photo Credit: Enokson
By - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - 9:42pm
I heard the most wonderful idea recently: Change happens in the gerund.
For the non-English majors out there, a gerund is basically a verb that ends in -ing. It’s usually combined with a form of the verb “to be”, which makes it a present participle. Present participles are used to indicate an action that is incomplete.
So to say that change happens in the gerund means that things don’t change, they are changing. Have been changing. Will be changing. It’s not enough to say that, for example, “libraries have changed” or “patrons have changed” or even that “libraries/patrons will change.” It’s better to say that “libraries are changing” and while you’re at it, acknowledge the fact that this is a process with no beginning and no end.
Not everything changes, of course. For example, dead things don’t change. And, um…that’s about it, really.
Fortunately, the industries that I am most connected to – libraries, education, law and technology – are not dead. As a matter of fact, all of them are currently in a period of massive change. So much change, in fact, that it seems like maybe all this change is new and pretty soon things will settle down and we can all relax.
Nope. Not gonna happen.
Sorry.
When you accept the idea that change happens in the gerund, you realize that you should never see change as a problem because if you do, you are setting yourself up for a life of disappointment. Why? Problems can be solved. Change as a problem can never be “solved” because there will always be more change happening. However, if you think of change as merely “a difficulty” or “a challenge”, then you are mentally braced for the work ahead without deluding yourself into thinking that you will ever be finished.
The goal post will keep moving. The issues you resolve will cease to be important and new issues – some of which you can’t even fathom at this point – will arise. You will never be “done.”
Change happens in the gerund.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spursfan_ace/
By - Sunday, April 17, 2011 - 11:45am
Hello faithful RSS subscribers!
The Special Libraries Association is running a group blog this year called “Future Ready 365” which features a new blog post a day on the future of information professionals. My contribution, “The Bomb Under the Table,” appears today. Check it out! And maybe add the Future Ready 365 blog to your reader too…t’s got lots of great contributions.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eworm/
By - Sunday, January 10, 2010 - 4:59pm
I like Seth Godin. His book Tribes (which I admittedly haven’t read yet) was quite the talk of SLA 2009. I also like his blog, which generally always gives me something to think about and wonder how I can apply to libraries. So when I saw that Mr. Godin – who is not a librarian – actually wrote about libraries, I was really excited to see what he had to say.
Aw, crud.
Aw. Crud.
It’s…not good. His idea of what libraries are, what they should be doing…I disagree with most of it. I want to unpack his post, but before I do, I want to make clear (and make sure it doesn’t get lost in the bottom of this post) that the main problem with this post lies with libraries and librarians. If someone like Seth Godin, who has met with librarians and has so many fans in the community, can get it so wrong, what does Joe Q. Public think of libraries? This should definitely be (yet another) wake up call that libraries need to think about how we market ourselves.
Okay, on to Mr. Godin’s post…
What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?
No problem here. I could be pedantic and harp on the “become relevant” verb usage which implies that libraries currently aren’t relevant, but pedantry helps no cause. I believe that it’s extremely useful and proper, especially when you are in a public service industry like libraries are, to periodically evaluate yourself and change course as necessary. And I don’t mind when non-librarians poke their head into our self-evaluations and offer suggestions – after all, they are our users.
So, one sentence in, we’re okay! Then the wheels fall off.
They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.)
What? Wow. So much wrong with this sentence. I mean, obviously for the purposes of his post, Mr. Grodin seems to be talking about public libraries, which is sort of the first problem. If you are reading this, then you are likely aware that there are dozens of types of libraries (many not even called libraries) with as many types of librarians. But, again, that’s really a minor quibble. All libraries are “community funded.” My academic law library is funded by tax dollars and student tuition – the community we serve. Corporate libraries/knowledge management centers are funded by the company whose employees they are expected to serve. There’s just no such thing as an independent library.
Mr. Godin says “repository” like it’s a bad thing. Someone needs to preserve knowledge. Just because something is not immediately needed, that does not mean future generations won’t need it. I take huge issue with the “books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.)” part of that statement. Want? Really? I mean, I guess it’s technically true in that I borrow books from my public library because I want to pay my bills and eat more than I want to buy books, but otherwise I just don’t see libraries as currently taking up the slack for people who just don’t feel like purchasing information resources. Call me a commie, but I have no problem with a community (be it a town, a company or educational institution) pooling resources so that all of its members may share information resources.
More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.
I get really nervous when we start judging the relevant “uplifting” value of resources, especially in a public library setting. Every library has a mission and ultimately it’s up for the community to decide what they want from their library. In law libraries, it’s not too hard. We, for the most part, collect the laws and the secondary materials that interpret them. It’s also not super-easy, though, because there are myriad decisions about which jurisdictions to collect, format, duplications, etc. Additionally, some law libraries are branching out from their basic mission and are starting “Popular Media Collections” (Deborah Schander discusses her current efforts in creating one here.) Personally, I would love to work on creating a collection like that, but I can see where some members of our community would have an issue with it.
Similarly, some people may have an issue with public libraries collecting DVDs. Surely these people don’t think that everything in a public library is intellectually stimulating, do they? Should public libraries only collect Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen? Should they chuck out the romance novels, science fiction and graphic novels? If DVDs go, does that mean books on tape have to go too? I have this crazy notion that I like to enjoy what I read. My favorite writers are Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene, but I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. Why can’t everyone have free enjoyment from the library?
Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.
Here’s my answer: We do. Or try to, anyway. I mean, this is sort of a major component of librarians’ raison d’etre. I don’t just hand out answers like candy at my reference desk. I show people how I found the answer. I teach a handful of bibliographic instruction sessions every semester in addition to CLEs – and what I do is minor in comparison to many that I know. (A quick check shows that my public library has dozens of computer skills classes every month.) Librarians aren’t trying to be gatekeepers of secret knowledge – we love to explain things to people.
Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books.
Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHA. Oh, man, I can’t wait to tell our aquisitions department to tell West to take their bills and STUFF THEM because INFORMATION IS FREE NOW. Frankly, this statement is just ignorant. Yes, there is a ton of great information on the web. However, there’s a little thing called copyright law that keep most information sources from being torrented up on the Internet free of charge – you know, legally at least. There’s also the fact that about 80-95% of all information on the Internet is in the Deep Web and therefore unreachable from search engine searches, not the mention that I’m not going to throw over a solid reference resource for a webpage unless I can verify that the source is legit. (I like to show my students this seemigly okay page on Dr. Martin Luther King. Check out the owner of the site and try not to vomit.) And, as I recented noted for my disclipline of law, while the information is free, the indexing and finding aids for it are not. So, while I wish that this would change, for the time being legal information is not free.
What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.
Like I said, we’re trying. Some of us, at least. There is a definite component of librarians who don’t want to explore all the possibilities of user engagement that are currently available, but I think that there are few out there that don’t want to help users find and use information. Obviously we’re not doing a great job on marketing this fact.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliona/202506372/
