During a recent year-end purge of my overloaded computer, I discovered a tiny velocipede animation I created some time ago while learning flash (click image to play):

May this be the most beautifully useless thing I ever produce.

Anyone who knows me also knows that I am inordinately interested in information graphics, as in tables, charts, maps, and so forth. In homage to this particular aspect of my nerdself, I’m breaking my long “holiday” blogging silence (which has largely consisted of writing my book-fingers to the bone) and welcoming the new year with a guest post over at Library Journal’s Stacking the Tech column. The article describes a residual effect of Twitter’s 2009 ascendancy – the increased popularity of information visualization:

Twitter and the Visual Dataverse

Sorry to disappoint, but this year-end review column is not about how Twitter “conquered the world in 2009.” To be sure, Twitter played its part as the emerging technology darling of 2009, and it would be hard to overlook the 140-character behemoth’s startlingly rapid influence on web-based communication. Trending and real-time searchability have achieved social, organizational, and commercial utility to a degree and diversity unrivaled by any other social media platform, save maybe Facebook. Twitter provides libraries with myriad creative outreach applications and encourages what in my own experience can be wildly productive professional backchannel discourse. Plus, now that Oprah Winfrey and David Lynch are both updating regularly, the site might as well be canonized in the popculturium…

Read on, if you are so inclined. And for those interested, here a few beautiful visualization blogs:

• FlowingData
• Visual Complexity
• Datavisualization.ch

My contribution to the Library Routes project:

I decided to become a librarian in of one of those blithe, accepting-the-good-advice of my elders-and-wisers-without-exactly-realizing-it moments. I had been out of Reed College for about a year, twisting in the damp post-liberal arts Portland wind with more than my share of ambivalence. My History degree (now paying off handsomely in the critical thought and expression dimension and which I wouldn’t trade for the world) at the time left me with few actual skills beyond academic doublespeak and being extremely good at naming the make and model of classic cars. Having rejected the idea of a PhD program in industrial/consumer culture history out of a sense that it was somehow misaligned, I was biding my time temping at Portland State University and vaguely trying to figure out what in hell to make of myself.

After a chance conversation with a fellow churchlady and former librarian named Mavis Davis (not making that up), my ever-wise and helpful mother suggested one day that I study librarianship at the UT School of Information (and if you don’t want to miss the strangest laptop calisthenics picture imaginable, follow that link). As was my way in slightly more stubborn days, I immediately dismissed her thinly-velied plot to get me “home to Texas where I belonged,” but her suggestion planted a seed of balky curiosity in my thick skull that eventually grew into genuine interest. I looked into the program, did the research, and started volunteering at the “Beverly Cleary branch” of the Multnomah County Public Library.

After a spell I discovered, somewhat to my amazement, that libraries, which I had always adored in a fierce (albeit somewhat distracted) home-sweet-nerd kind of way, seemed also to promise the perfect mix of altruism, public service, intellectualism, and… what else? It was my calling, yet I actually had no idea what the professional setting would entail. Librarianship is one of those careers people often enter on faith, as in not knowing exactly what they are getting into in terms of prospects or fruition, but with no problem explaining why. That it seemed like the most inherently helpful and non-evil work imaginable was all the justification I needed.

I did the obligatory degree, racked up a ton of hours working as a grad assistant in many amazing UT Libraries, and completed a practicum organizing the Planned Parenthood Capital of Texas Region video lending library to assuage my guilt for not taking any cataloging. After graduation I tried for a long and frustrating a year to get a professional academic job in Austin, which had its brisket-covered (meat)hooks in me almost beyond the point of redemption. After being shut down with the best of them, I lucked into my Reference/Instruction position at the Ohio University Libraries, which was a spectacular orientation to the field and serendipitous chance to earn a second master’s in Educational Technology. Now I’m at UC Berkeley having a marvelous time trying to explain myself, and thanking my lucky stars for listening to an extremely good suggestion six years ago.

End of (relatively short) story. And, per usual: many thanks for the dead-on advice, Momma.

About a month after the UCB student library study-in protest and two months after the UC-wide walkout, Friday is another day of actions and striking at UC Berkeley and at other UC campuses in reaction to the 32% fee hike that was approved by the UC regents yesterday. This morning students occupied Wheeler Hall and as of 4pm were are still barricaded inside the building. You can follow the events and post-coverege via Twitter at #ucstrike and #ucbprotest.

At about 11 am fire alarms were pulled almost simultaneously in a number of campus buildings and libraries, my two home bases (Doe and Moffitt) included. I spent an hour with a colleague’s borrowed iPhone walking around, talking to students, faculty, and staff, and taking pictures of the demonstrations as people waited to hear if we would be readmitted to our buildings. Doe and Moffitt remained closed for the day, as have other buildings that received the alarm treatment. As alarms were pulled crowds would flood out of buildings, and the center of campus was covered with people waiting, wandering, and participating in demonstrations in at times heavy rainfall. I saw a few bizarre campus tours happening in the middle of all of this, with bewildered/ stoked/ agog potential students taking in all the drama. I heard “welcome to Cal!” hollered at these groups good-naturedly on more than one occasion.

You can see my pics via a public Facebook album:

Students I spoke to were unilaterally extremely upset by the fee increases, whether they supported the occupation tactics or not. I have read only one injury report thus far on Twitter but have started to see protest footage pop up on YouTube 1 | 2 of students rumbling with campus police around Wheeler Hall. The DailyCal student newspaper website is at the time of this post somewhat overwhelmed with traffic and slow to load, but is providing fast of the events including more footage on YouTube.

Police cordon around Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley.

Last (unconfirmed) news via Twitter is that the Dean of Students, Chief of UCPD, Senator Cynthia Nava, and others have entered Wheeler to negotiate with student occupiers.

As anyone with visible tattoos, hairless cats, or a penchant for decorating with look-but-don’t-use vintage objects such as ornamental table napkins can attest: the more esoteric you are, the more you end up having to explain yourself. When your mystifying characteristic, animal, or possession attracts attention, you have a choice: A) explain clearly in a way that provides insight, B) explain inscrutably in a way that creates further confusion, or C) explain not at all, opting instead for frowns, rudeness, and so on. As a fierce and firm believer in pollyanism, politeness, and all other manifestations of posi-professionalism, I am (predictably) in favor of A.

People who work in information and/or technology-related professions know the explanation dance well, because our jobs are by nature esoteric. That is to say, programmers, librarians, and so forth do mysterious and confusing things with information (such as coding and classification) so that others can actually search and communicate without having to think about what makes this possible. By structuring, scaffolding, describing, organizing, and investigating data and resources, we facilitate access. And without access, there is no potential for the iterative creation and accumulation of knowledge.

Adaptation or Obsolescence

Belonging to the librarian species of the genus information requires an earnest and abiding dedication to access as a professional ethic. Our purpose is to encourage intellectual freedom, curiosity, and self-sufficiency among information users, in order to give them the means and methodology for pursuing their own interests. Librarians are the unique group of knowledge workers ready/willing to, confidentially, consistently, and free of the ever-encroaching profit imperative, support individuals and organizations as they discover why and how they might come to better understand their own needs and abilities as learners, knowers, and producers. And as interdisciplinarity becomes more complexly layered and scholarly communication shifts with technological landscape, librarians excel as “disciplinary discourse mediators” that facilitate connections between disparate academic and intellectual actors.

Librarians were wearing free/libre/open long before it became the new black. As the open information and privacy movements fight for traction, we represent a vastly well-established nonprofit network with the purchasing, outreach, and advocacy power to push for more systemic openness on institutional, corporate, and federal fronts. Despite this, it will not come as any surprise that, while the information genus is exploding, many feel that our species is under consequent threat of extinction, sure to be winnowed out by the malignant encroachment of digitization and various other developments in technology and literacy. As a result, librarianship is, by virtue of the radically shifting nature of the analog v. digital present (not to mention the general crisis facing the funding of altruism), shining an increasingly intense spotlight on the core of its professional purpose. This means that to some degree, every librarian is a walking, talking identity crisis. We are a group that has begun to ask ourselves more or less constantly if we are still relevant, and if not, how we can regain relevance in the face of a sea change. Some are true believers and others are skeptics, but all are aware of the stakes: adaptation, or obsolescence.

E-Whatting?

Which brings me back to explaining esoterica. For the past year, I’ve had the ambiguous-sounding title of ‘E-Learning Librarian’, an occupational moniker of such vagueness that it implicitly requires elaboration. Upon stating it to just about anyone inside or outside of the fold, I am met with something along the lines of, “Hm.” And if they are particularly nerdy, curious, and/or totally confused, this is followed by, “And what does that mean (read: what do ‘e’ and ‘learning’ have to do with libraries)?” To my mind, quite a lot: supporting the productive life of the university and individual learners via technologies and information skills that facilitate more successful and personalizable research and discourse.

However, this is so infrequently unintuitive that it speaks to the oft-cited epic fail that has occurred in communicating what it is that librarians actually do to anyone other than ourselves. Meaning, in effect, that obsolescence is less our challenge than plain old obscurity. I still have the feeling that the advances we are making are having a loop effect – more thoroughly lauded within our knowledge network than put to practice outside of it. I explain my title so often that I’ve realized it invariably requires exposing some of the hidden and/or nascent aspects of librarianship that I very much wish were common knowledge (e.g., ‘e’ and learning). While this pains me somewhat, I have also come to relish the outreach challenge of having one of those library/technology-oriented jobs that, even within my own profession, people cannot intuit what it is, exactly, that they are supposed to get.

Imbalancing Ambiguity

It’s become a fascinatingly reflective linguistic game to communicate the focus of my work, because it requires me to engage in two things: disambiguation, and ontological balancing. In most thesauri, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, controlled vocabulary is implicit. In Wikipedia, however, disambiguation pages are necessitated by the absence of formal subject indexing. Community-defined folksonomy, by virtue of its opposition to controlled vocabulary, gives rise to polysemic classification. Polysemy is the semantic condition of multiple definitions and/or meanings, which in a resource as vast and collective as Wikipedia is the natural and awe-inspiring result of countless ontologies clashing under a gigantic semantic umbrella.

An ontology can be broadly understood as a vocabulary that represents shared ideas, principles, or categories in a subject or subgroup. Ontology is the descriptive syntax of epistemology, which is the broader “creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.”  As you might gather, unfamiliar ontologies require disambiguation. To disambiguate ontology itself: in philosophy, ontologism is the pursuit of insight into existence, as in defining what is is. In computer and information science, it is the formalization of descriptive categories. An apropos example of ontology balancing might then be this: in librarianship, the notion of ontology could be likened to controlled vocabulary; in the sciences, to taxonomy; and in social media, to folksonomy.

Oldschool/Newschool

In a vocational sense, ontologies are how we communicate complex and discipline-specific ideas amongst ourselves that are utterly incomprehensible to those outside our idea network (as in why, if you are a non-librarian, you have no idea what I mean by ACRL and LITA). The ontology of librarianship has long been in flux, which is why job titles like “E-Learning Librarian” are increasingly common. Ontology balancing is a slippery game of connecting concepts to memories to impressions to histories, and above all to considering what about your knowledge system aligns with that of another. Intriguingly, upon becoming more closely allied with the newschool, it has become somewhat more challenging to disambiguate my professional identity in this way.

As in many things, breaking wholly with the past is not an excellent  strategy – in so doing, you lose the cumulative experience and memory of those that have gone before you, and with it some of the ability and impetus to communicate to an outside world that a break has occurred. This makes me realize that I very much appreciate the tangible and interpersonal durability of the oldschool. Which is to say, while I love the instructional and information technology angles of what I do, over the past year I have also missed things like stamping and shelving and working closely with an academic department, all of which helped connect me to the core of my profession.

I’ve learned to explain concisely (and I hope understandably) what most would consider a nontraditional/newschool iteration of what a librarian can be, yet I have also lamented that beyond reference and instruction, my professional identity of late has not reflected at least a few more of these traditional/oldschool characteristics, which more often than not involve opportunities to create personal connections with library users. At Ohio University I worked an integrated service desk where I was able to answer reference questions as well as check out books, and was bibliographer for the School of Communications, both of which I loved doing. These gave me a practical context for perceiving ways developing library services and resources could be useful, not to mention usefully communicated. They also provided points of resonance with existing library perceptions that helped prevent full break syndrome from occurring.

When it comes to advocating for the future of libraries, I have come to believe that embracing the stamping and shushing as well as the e and learning will be crucial to helping us build a conceptual bridge between then and now: however skewed towards the oldschool perceptions may be, there is still considerable social capital wrapped up in the library/ian mindshare. Ontology balancing therefore becomes a process of gleaning what I can about someone’s information value system and describing the relevant aspects of my own practice as a librarian, technologist, and educator in a way that resonates with their personal experience. Ever mindful of the aforementioned stakes (adaptation v. obsolescence), I try to do so in a way that at once reflects tradition and pushes the relevance envelope.

Metacognitive Embedding

As of November 1st, at least one part of my job became a little more traditional, and by extension more intuitive. By ‘intuitive’ I don’t mean that it became easier to do, insofar as it became easier to describe. Upon the retirement of a colleague, I’ve taken on selection/liaison responsibilities to the UC Berkeley School of Information. Many librarians might remember the I School as among the first revisionist MLS programs to actively shift away from the librarian paradigm of information studies, losing ALA accreditation in the mid-1990s. In this sense, I might represent a curiously traditional (some might even say vestigial) role as their library liaison. Paradoxically, as E-Learning Librarian to the I School, I am once again a buyer of books – some digital, some very much printed. While selection is only one small part of the multifaceted work of liaising (which is yet another closely examined topic), it will undoubtedly give my “What is it you do again?” explainees a little more to grab on to.

Part of the professional ethic of librarianship is objective captivation with the research interests and information-seeking process, be it momentary (reference interaction) or ongoing (long-term research consulting or liaising). Along these lines, the fascinating part of being a selector, subject specialist, bibliographer, liaison – whatever you choose to call it – is something I think of as metacognitive embedding. Metacognition is thinking about thinking in order to understand one’s knowledge and abilities, while embedding is the act of becoming immersed in an authentic context. For the selector/liaison, working with/for a department and collection involves metacognitive embedding to develop critical insight into the research needs and information profile of an academic microcosm.

In this process, reflection is required in order to walk a familiar tightrope between specialization and generalization, to balance the interests of particular department against the macrocosm of scholarly communication within its broader discipline. One learns the publications, individuals, concepts, tools, movements, vocabulary, professional associations, and resources in order to faithfully make them available, useful, and utilized. This also becomes a process of resource balancing – time, a collections budget, institutional interests, the attention span of your constituents – in order to become an embedded human information resource. In liaising to the I School, I am faced with an interesting challenge: using the embedding process as a practical means of bridging the obsolescence/obscurity gap among those most likely to perceive it.

Disambiguating Librarianship

The inspiration for this post came last week during an I School Friday seminar on “data as evidence” (you can view my tweets from the event – sorry for the image, no hashtag used). At one point in his talk, Tom Moritz eloquently defined the three-part purpose of librarianship: to explore the ontologies/epistemologies of the disciplines, to encourage information sharing, and to preserve knowledge and access to knowledge. As I see it, these pursuits are indispensable, format/technology/era independent, and contextually malleable. I have lately been engaged almost exclusively in the latter two, but taking on the selector/liaison role gladly gives me the opportunity to again focus on the first: to become an active, engaged, and embedded information advocate and de facto knowledge management consultant to a specific community.

As luck would have it, I find myself handed a subject area in which I am avidly interested, and in which librarianship is on fertile ground for both disambiguation and adaptation. In this context, it will be a true challenge to pursue the metacognitive embedding process. I relish the opportunity to be in the position of shifting the library ontology in an extremely relevant microcosm while at the same time reclaiming a bit more of my traditional identity. Needless to say, it will be interesting to discover how to explain myself to this community in a way that, on an interpersonal and practical level, reintegrates librarianship in the broader epistemology of knowledge management. I look forward to, for lack of a better phrase, sussing out how to integrate into the discourse and dynamic of a discipline at the forefront of the information paradigm shift. To those who might have a more oldschool definition of librarianship, I hope to represent the profession as one that, as it evolves, is less in need of eschewing a perceived “past” than of more clearly and contextually illuminating its connections to the present and future.

Thanks to friend and cubicle farm-mate Lynn Jones for her insights on this post.

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.