I recently gave three very similar presentations on Informing Innovation at two very different conferences, LAUC-B 2009 and Internet Librarian 2009. I’ve posted my slides from each event, which, from a design perspective, was an interesting exercise in repurposing content make similar points to distinct audiences. Reusing/recycling is one of my instructional design absolutes (e.g., never start from scratch if you don’t have to).

The LAUC-B 2009 conference, “Student library users: Deliver what they need – the way they want it,” (obviously) explored student needs and characteristics in order to create library services that reflect actual desires rather than our assumptions. The format of the LAUC presentations was interesting, and something I plan to keep in mind for similar events should I ever have a hand in organizing any – in a short afternoon panel, myself and two other groups gave 15-minute “teaser” introduction to what we would be talking about at a longer 45-minute “breakout session.”

By allowing participants to get a feel for the presenters and the way they might tackle their topics, I found this short/long format stagger to be excellent at addressing the perennial which-session-do-I-go-to dilemma that arises from trying to make snap decisions based on vague titles. The LAUC conference itself was excellent – I had an incredibly responsive audience, and any stage I get to share with Joan Lippincott and Sarah Houghton-Jan is a fine stage by me. My talk at Internet Librarian covered similar content in a much shorter format, universalized a bit to be more useful to the typically public-heavy crowd. My IL attendees were relatively sleepy, but with the 4:45 slot and consequent audience burnout I’m lucky people weren’t holding their eyelids open. It’s a busy week, so I will reflect more on both conferences when I come up for air (view my archived tweets/responses from #il2009, for starters).

Here are my slides from each session (and if you’ve seen my ACRL presentation on the Ohio research project, look again – some is duplicative, but much content is new):

LAUC-B Part 1 (short)

LAUC-B Part 2 (long)

And finally, tailored to an Internet Librarian audience (can you spot the differences?):

In an excellent turn of events, the Berkeley student “Study-In” protest and resulting parent donations I posted about a few weeks ago have allowed the University Library to resume Saturday service, as well as provide our traditional 24 hour staffing during finals. Along with a number of other librarians, I volunteered to provide a staff presence at the overnight event. My shift occurred during the early hours of the morning (which is quickly apparent if you take a look at my pictures).

The 5 am situation meant that I missed many of the teach-in activities that other staff were able to witness, but even simply listening to students snoring in the stacks was well worth my time. It was one of those instances when I was able to see how strongly students can prioritize library spaces, and furthermore that, given the right context, they will demonstrate this sense of ownership via challenging gestures if they feel their needs are being deprioritized. I feel oddly grateful to be orienting to this campus during such a fraught period, because it continues to provide insight into the complicated culture I find myself in. I was absolutely impressed by the way various parties involved handled the situation, and watching the interplay between stakeholders highlighted the delicate balance between action and reaction in complex organizations. It also reminds one that, particularly at a time of scarce resources and/or diverging interests, it definitely pays to be transparent and flexible rather than pugnacious and furtive.

The best part of the experience by far was a manifestation of the cardinal rule of good manners, which my sweet Texan mother drilled into me at length: a hand-made thank you card left by event organizers for library staff who volunteered their time. It features a pencil-replicated Banksy graphic (“there is always hope“) complete with tiny heart sculpted out of cheese-rind wax, and this inscription:

Dear Librarians,

Thank you for your support, solidarity, and love. Most of all, thank you for your belief that all students deserve a library where they can study, learn, grow, and come together. These last 24 hours wouldn’t have been possible without you.

Thank you!

I have been fortunate to benefit from many strong and lasting mentorships, which have invariably brought a great deal of richness to my learning/working experience. It was therefore with great sadness that I received news today that a loved and respected teacher and mentor of mine, Dr. Sandra “Sandy” Turner, passed away this week after a long struggle with cancer. I just wanted to take a moment to recognize her as a tireless advocate and educator who worked to bring instructional/technology/experiential learning knowledge to many, including a group of Ghanaian educators as a part of a Fulbright she worked on in 2003-04. Her interests spanned from gender issues in IT to the role of mentorship in technology education for teachers.

She was a curious, supportive, challenging, and rigorous advisor who encouraged me to take the research I conducted as a librarian/graduate student at Ohio University to its full potential (which eventually became the report I published earlier this year). She was also deeply hilarious, thoughtful, and, to put it mildly, a knockout. My heartfelt condolences to her family, friends and fellow former students. She will be sorely missed.

Dr. Sandra Turner leads a Skype conference with M.Ed. students in Winneba, Ghana.

In the past few months, I have finally started to feel like I’m entering the home stretch of a long and fierce Saturn Return. If you are dimly versed in pseudo-astrological wooness, this is the period around your 28th year where life kicks the proverbial shit out of you. More like what makes you you, as in your concepts of self, stability, and reality. According to The Wikipedia (which I quote with fierce abandon), your Saturn Return is when you must, by the very act of rounding 30, “jettison old concepts and worn out patterns of living,” the same cycle that eventually results in a midlife crisis.

This has been a year of tremendous transition – switching jobs, moving from the woods of Appalachia to the jewel of Oakland, breaking bones, writing maniacally, and a number of other things that are a bit t.m.i. for this venue. Usually any of these would not merit much processing beyond the ordinary, but at the right time a culmination of events like this can catalyze tremendous internal upheaval. It’s a bit like reverse plate tectonics, wherein surface tremors cause high-magnitude emotional earthquakes at the most buried of faultlines. In my case, Saturn returned, filmed itself kicking the shit out of me, and then posted the footage to YouTube.

Which, I am elated to discover, turns out to be a beautifully didactic experience. After careening blindly through my adolescence and twenties, I can now name the converging forces of my adulthood: knowledge (that I know absolutely nothing), insight (that I am no different from anyone else), realism (that I was never invincible to begin with) and wisdom (that I am a completely better off and more solid knowing these things). Because I have finally started learning my lessons, I feel compelled to share them via this series of Saturn Return posts.

Lesson 1: Clean up after yourself.

Like most people I suffer from an innate lack of confidence, otherwise known as insecurity. Insecurity is the nagging feeling that something somewhere is not quite right about yourself (or anything else, for that matter), and that if you could just either a) ignore it or b) root it out or c) compel enough people to tell you that nothing is wrong that it might go away. The thing is, you never can quite put your finger on what or how many things are amiss, and the very idea of wrongness shifts and blends depending on your context until it is simply a pervasive feeling of fear. In meetings, fear of saying something inane or unerringly stepping on someone’s toes. In relationships, fear of messing up or being deceived. In cooking, fear of burning the pie crust. In teaching, fear of coming off as uninteresting or realizing that your fly is down. In this post, fear of sounding like a bombastic jackass. And so on.

Insecurity results in all manner of unpleasantness depending on your personality, from arrogance to excessive apologizing to bar fights to cyclical depression. I have come to believe that the root of insecurity is a simple unwillingness or inability to face what you fear about yourself, which, if you let it, manifests in the abovementioned variety of negatively conditioned responses. To get the obligatory Texas reference out of the way, this is somewhat akin to the invisible cockroach threat I experienced in my Austin kitchen in library school. You are pretty much certain that something very wrong is lurking just out of sight, but you’re not sure where and you certainly don’t want to find out. All you can really rely on is that the thing you are most definitely not looking for will jump out at you when you least expect or want it to.

Given the situation, your choices are limited. You can 1) flinch every time you open a drawer 2) decide you weren’t that hungry in the first place, 3) leave the light off and crash around trying to find the churchkey while pissing off your neighbors, or 4) pretend roaches don’t exist while going about your business with an omnipresent sensation of proto-palmetto nausea. The thing is, the choice you make in this situation depends on the strength of your fear. To extend the disturbing metaphor, there are roach seasons, and there are not-roach seasons. In July, I lived in abject terror of the kitchen, but by January I had completely forgotten to worry about it.

For the past 28 years I have been trapped in the July kitchen of my insecurity, much likelier to flinch, turn on my heels, and take my Lone Star without a coozy, thank you very much, than deal with the fact that I had a roach problem. Every so often I mustered the courage to pick up my broom and enter the combat zone, but usually I just succumbed to dread and avoidance. My saturnretinized wisdom has helped me discover that trying to kill an emotional cockroach is just about as satisfying as attempting to ignore it, and furthermore that neither tactic works in the slightest. Not only that, I have come to see the hilarious irony in this cycle of fear and (lack of) response: the real strategy was there all along, and insanely simple to boot. You can create January in July by simply cleaning house. It’s amazing – you don’t have to ignore or kill as many things if you just pick up after yourself every once in a while. At age 23 I finally remembered that somewhere in the recesses of my apartment was a bucket of cleaning supplies, furnished lovingly by my mother as a welcome-and-what-took-you-so-long-to-get-home present when I moved back after college (along with a gallon of Bluebell, a six pack of beer, and a bag of brisket).

I have definitely grown tired of flinching and, with a lot of work, have realized that if I own up to the things I worry about and keep them from getting away from me I won’t be as likely to develop nervous tics or rampage through infestations. Oddly, confronting insecurity is not actually confrontation at all – it’s a process of ongoing damage control wherein you keep your emotional recycling on the porch and mop the floor of your conscience every once in a while so that there will be fewer invisible threats lurking in the corners of your brain. The best part of this is (and the point at which my analogy breaks down a little), I have found that many of the things I worry about often turn out not to be there, or something entirely different than I expected. In other words, the more drawers I open, the more it dawns on me that the roaches were illusory, or in actuality were just napkin rings.

Caveat: The opposite extreme is just as important to watch out for, however. If you are obsessive about emotional tidying, you become as controlling and irritating as an  anal host. Neither is pretty, and both are avoidable.

Stay tuned for Lesson 2: Know Your Limits.

I’m having one of those weeks that help me realize that true meaning of “library community,” which at Berkeley is characteristically fierce. To make a long story somewhat short: due to system-wide funding issues this year (20% across-the-board budget cut in our case), almost all campus libraries have been forced to close on Saturdays, as well as curtail our traditional 24-hour staffing period during finals week.
Needless to say, this news has not been met with rejoicing. Instead, here are two amazing responses:

1. Following the UC system-wide walkout on September 24, Berkeley students are holding an all-night “Study In” at the Anthropology Library tonight, to protest the cuts and Saturday closures. Instead of dragging students out by their armpits, campus police and library staff/administration are working together to make sure the event is both possible and safe, and that it communicates its intended message. Yours truly will be “staffing” the study-in in gleeful solidarity from 4-10 AM, as in providing a voluntary (flex-timed!) presence from 4-10 am, to make sure all is well, not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t miss this for anything , alongside my one of my favorite colleagues. Should be a shift to remember.

2. Just as incredibly, an anonymous donor gave the Libraries $30,000 to cover 24-hour staffing during finals.

The Chancellor has already asked our Director to present an estimate of what it will cost to reopen on Saturdays. This type of two-pronged response to our collective adversity is amazing, and an excellent reminder of the general goodwill that keeps us all running. Will tweet my study-in shift @charbooth this morning and follow-up post next week.

I have a motto in life and work that has been coming in especially handy lately – chin up, head down. This is a clear manifestation of my southern upbringing, where maintaining a good disposition while not drawing too much fire/attention (e.g., “kicking up a fuss”) in any context is something of a religion. This is easy enough when things are copasetic, but  recent currents have me considering the even-keelness of my reactions to workplace duress more closely.  It is no longer news that tough times all around are hastening what has been characterized as the “new normal” in librarianship. While all of us are experiencing it a bit differently, my personal new normal is this -  along with every other employee in the UC system, starting next month I will receive a sizable pay cut in the form of furloughs for the temporary (re: foreseeable) future. Brian Mathews at Ubiquitous Librarian, another recent UC transplant, recently posted on his response to the situation, which is to donate any free time created by the furloughs to library schools and organizations, etc. This is a graceful gesture and a good reminder that, unpleasant or no, a less lucrative job is much better than no job at all (not to mention a nod to the fact that, for new job/skill seekers, the wheels keep turning even in a morass).

Last year I wrote about manners and hospitality in librarianship from the perspective of one who spent a great deal of my day at a public service desk at the OU Libraries in a relatively sanguine budgetary climate. This post discussed directing the cult of politeness outwards to improve the library user experience. In my transition to E-Learning Librarian at UC Berkeley over the past year, while the user experience is still the end-all-be-all of what I do, much of my professional focus has shifted internally. I now devote significant time to the staff side of technology, teaching, and learning, which involves connecting with colleagues to encourage cross-library educational and technology initiatives, not to mention a lot of external collaboration. As a result, I observe campus and organizational dynamics much more closely, which offers me a different perspective on the strain many of us are experiencing in the current funding crisis (not to mention the ongoing perceived/actual digital transition affecting libraries in general).

My sense is that, although they might eventually start to feel less dire, the lean years are here to stay – my own organization received a 20% budget cut this year, unlikely to be a distant memory for some time to come, if ever. In academic libraries in general, this means that our funding structures and working models are simply going to have to change. Economic crisis as the immediate catalyst for this means that, at least initially, said change is likely to be reactive/defensive rather than creative/interactive.  Stripping down, cutting back, and shaving off means that from here on out, a focus on productivity and consolidation is going to be increasingly apparent. I don’t mean productivity just in the assembly-line sense, but in terms of the culture that informs how we accomplish the work that we do individually as well as collaboratively.

Negative workplace dynamics are easily exacerbated when times get trying, which is why I’m trying to approach the productivity question from not only from a do-more-with-less angle, but by strategizing around how to respond gracefully to the series of constraints shaping our organizations.  It is in this context that I wanted to reflect on the most practical, productive manifestation of my personal cult of manners, something I think of as unconditional collegiality. Unconditional collegiality goes like this:

1. neither complain excessively nor talk shit about others

2.  maintain a pollyanna attitude to a reasonable degree

3.  focus on what is solvable rather than irreparable

4. resist and reject pecking orders, unspoken hierarchies, down-nosing, pitting, judging, comparing, or stacking anyone or anything against anything or anyone else

5. dish only constructive criticism

All of this can be reduced to a simple, golden, working rule – be posi, not judgy.

I recognize that occupational negativity is a risk of working just about anywhere in any capacity. I remember being mystified to find that I had made an unintentional nemesis in the snowcone hut where I sweated out four summers of my teenage life, something about ice block placement or allegedly shirking my syrup-refilling duties. Coworker is one rung above stepsibling and two rungs above cellmate on the ladder of potentially fraught non-elective human relationships, and being thrown together in a shared productive space can open unimaginable cans of worms. The reason I am against all resulting manifestations of workplace drama is because, not only do they accomplish precisely nothing, they are compounded by the strain of times like the present. 

Academic libraries, especially tenure-track systems, are susceptible to the darker aspects of academe’s competitive culture, yet we remain rooted in an ethic of service, support, and mutual curiosity. We all hear (or have our own) horror stories about enmity, undercutting, and occupational rudeness, but to what purpose? Librarians were not put on this earth to scrutinize and consume each other, but to forward the knowledge capacities of our communities and users. Factor in the funding situation, and we now have a rather dire incentive to figure out exactly how best to stop getting in each other’s way.

When I recently presented on collaboration at an ALA preconference for reference managers in Chicago, participants were preoccupied with workplace dynamics, dismayed or heartened by how  personnel in their organizations seemed to be dealing or not dealing with various cost-cutting, consolidation, and reduction measures. Without exception, how people communicated through the stress was either making or breaking the situation. Competition may be a natural aspect of working, but, sartorially speaking, in profession with no profit imperative it hangs on us like a burlap sack. In contexts where taking something away from a coworker literally means more money, success, adulation, etc. for you, maybe I get it. But seriously – I became a librarian precisely because I was uninterested in this kind of dynamic.

Unconditional collegiality plays a little differently in every working culture. Early on at my present job, I received an excellent piece of advice – at Berkeley, it pays to have thick skin. At the time I had difficulty interpreting this, but I have discovered that all it means is that my present context is simply a little fierce – here, critical questioning is a way of life, and it pays to cultivate the skill of not taking things personally and maintaining an objective distance without conflating the emotional and the professional. This is an important lesson, the ability to distinguish critique from criticism while still  maintaining collegiality.

An ethic of mutual support and respect in an organization can be made more apparent by the present crisis (precisely when it is most needed). I was recently a few minutes late to an uncharacteristically prompt and totally packed staff forum on our budget situation (“Berkeley time” usually means that everything starts exactly and precisely ten minutes after it is scheduled). I found a seat and spent the next hour sitting on my hands waiting to learn how many of us were likely to get laid off – UC projections had been terrible, and no one really had much of a sense of what was to come. As the meeting wore on through various specifics and cost-cutting measures, I became increasingly perplexed by how essentially unstressed everyone seemed to look, and wondered what I was missing. Turns out, I had missed the most important thing of all – the first words out of the director’s mouth had been “we will manage to avoid layoffs for the next fiscal year.”

That is what you call getting to the core of the message. Despite the worst-case-scenarioing we had all been doing on a personal level, it wasn’t a sense of individual relief that was most apparent to me in this moment. Rather, it was the recognition of collective relief – a sincere feeling of “we’re all in this together” had existed long before we received word that there would be no layoffs. This is a perfect example of the term community of practice, and I truly believe anyone in my organization would rather have taken more furloughs than see someone else lose their job. The financial conundrum is affecting each organization differently, straining weak links and shining harsh light on rough spots – this type of collective support should be the one constant.

Like the banks and auto firms that keep crashing and burning, academic libraries are still dragged down by the weight of our own complexity and made complacent by an inflated (albeit well-intentioned) sense of our own importance. As research, literacy, and education moves on with or without us, we all face huge, and I mean huge, paradigm shifts. While the cuts we receive now may heal, I hope they also leave scars that remind us that the assumptions and safety nets we hold onto about librarianship are now no longer only rhetorically a thing of the past. We are all about to have to be very productive for a very long time, meaning that cultivating more of what makes working together easier – those qualities that alleviate the sensation of wanting (or having) to go it alone – are the deceptively simple elements of achieving the focus necessary to hold together as we redefine.

Thanks to Lia for her deft editorial help on this one.

Although the moment has passed, I was recently mulling over Meredith Farkas’ reply to a piece by Sarah Cohen about her rationale for not participating in Library Day in the Life. Did reporting on our daily ins and outs represent an exercise in professional insight, or was it evidence of some sort of collective librarian lackadaisicality? I believe that  it depends on how you looked at it as you did it. In addition to Meridith’s point of the value of creating a record of how librarians work for anyone who should care to be interested, I participated because I rely on metacognitive thinking to help me figure out a) how I do things, and b)  how I might do them better – using intentionality, which is how Sarah characterized what she hoped to see from the meme in a response to Meredith’s post.

Writing about each day in terms of what I wanted to accomplish and what I actually accomplished was an exercise in  occupational realism, and an assessment of my own working habits – considering how I did what I did in order to, in effect, suss myself out, and to do so in a way that contributed to the collective dialogue/record Meridith mentions. This is entirely practical. Given the state of funding in higher education, we are all going to be doing more with less from here on out.  My own department is down three instructors, which is going to translate to a lot more teaching, the emotional/energetic demands of which can have a disruptive effect on other, ongoing projects. In this context, I welcomed the opportunity to reflect a bit on how I approach getting things done.

Actual Thursday and Ideal Thursday stayed in lockstep, and ended with a busy reference shift with several sharp/long/interesting interactions (anthropological readings of food and folklore, gendered social conditions under different dictatorships, etc.).

Ideal Friday is looking much less relentless:

- Backup scheduling duties for web-requested instruction sessions while a colleague is out of town

- Do some planning for Fall fac/staff co-training schedule (I offer sessions via the campus Educational Technology Services training space in CMS/library integration) – retool my approach to the eRes/eReadings session using a model syllabus review exercise

- Strategize around a more consultation-based faculty/instructor outreach service model for CMS/library integration (has largely been facilitated thus far by connections made during formal trainings)

- Write, write, write. I had a book epiphany yesterday that will resolve some nagging structural problems, thank the maker.

My Library Day in the Life, penultimate.

Actual Wednesday was another resounding success – made good headway on my updating and communication housecleaning, and was satisfied with my progress on the tutorial. The editing, however, left me a little cold. Still stalling on the chapter submission front – beating the dead horse otherwise known as revision has never been my strongest suit.

Ideal Thursday

Today ideal and actual have effectively merged. I’ve been so busy thus far that I’m only just getting to this extremely hasty Library Day in the Life post – suffice to say that it’s all meetings (e.g., with the amazing Education/Psychology Library head, Susan Edwards, about next steps for the Ed/Psych iteration of the eReadings pilot service), reference desk shifts, email (e.g., to a faculty member about reviewing her syllabus on the eReadings front) Library FAQ cleanup, and no time to look back.

Actual Tuesday was right on, especially in terms of the Anthro instruction session I led, which was indeed earth-shattering. In the summer my teaching/training load goes way down, so it’s not unusual for me to feel a bit out of my element. This class, however, had a very engaged grad instructor and unusually bright/attentive students, even for Berkeley. Small class, too, which allowed for a lot of personal discussion and milling around. One of my best classes to date, and I was grateful for the excellent suggestions/feedback they submitted via online student/instructor assessments (I give out a quick tinyurl-linked Google form survey to students at the end of a F2F class or training, then email a similar Google form to course instructors).

Ideal Wednesday

- keep cleaning house, finish updating programs.

– watch/review bSpace CMS training screencast created by Berkeley Educational Technology Services, compile list of impressions/style thoughts to share with ETS colleagues.

- begin design process/planning for screencast following the same template (on using the CMS to create eReadings lists and link to library/research resources)

- get on top of old emails, scheduling, etc.

- send a few disjointed chapters to my intrepidly becrutched friend and editor Lia Friedman.

All in the name of Library Day in the Life | #librarydayinthelife.

[postscript: Laotian dinner was amazing - fried catfish in kaffir orange curry and roasted rice salad (larp kao). Plus $2 BeerLao, best deal in Oakland. Too much spice per usual, but well worth the torment.]