One of the things that keeps me occupied is an ongoing interest in technology.  For example, I am fascinated with the way in which Facebook has become a sort of standard in my daily life.  Recently I’ve reconnected with a dozen or more high school classmates.  These are people I have not seen or heard from for about 25 years.  I hated high school and I have mixed feelings at times about reconnecting with classmates, but I’ve found that the effort is very worthwhile.  I’ve discovered that out of a class size of about 65 people from a small country town in east central Illinois, my former classmates lead distinguished and interesting lives.  Just to give a sampling, one is a highly successful thoroughbred horse trainer; another is a curator for a famous author’s home, now a museum and a place that’s on the National Register of Historic Places. One of my former classmates worked fulltime while raising a child as a single mom AND earned her bachelor’s degree. Another person is an assistant principal, while yet another person is a vice president for a health care company. One classmate is pursuing the same graduate program that I went through, at the same institution.  Two former classmates  are in the military.  These people are spread all over the United States and in some cases live outside the U.S.  And the list goes on…I’ve even reconnected with former neighbors of the subdivision in the small town I grew up in and we are planning to have a neighborhood reunion soon!

I also continue to be fascinated with the development of applications for the iPhone.  I’m biased of course, but I think the iPhone is, by far, the best mobile computing platform out there.  And it keeps getting better.  For example, one of the upcoming applications will allow me to store, manage, and peruse scientific journal articles.  This app will be called Papers and although its purpose seems rather simple at first, the concept and its implications are huge in terms of the way in which researchers and scientists can interact with scholarly literature.

Even my use of Twitter (it’s a love it or hate it kind of thing) has developed and changed over time.  I’ve come to appreciate its benefits and figured out how I can use it in a way that doesn’t drive me crazy.

Anyway, back to the initial point about looking forward to Spring.  On this Valentine’s Day I woke up to a coating of snow that makes everything look clean and bright once more. I hope though that it melts quickly and that warmer weather, green grass, and Spring flowers will arrive soon.

The recent election results here in the U.S. have contributed to a deep funk. My attitude and thinking have been mostly negative and as a result I haven’t been a great person to be around, virtually (e.g. on Facebook) or in person. I have even managed to offend others, which is never ok.

I think I invested way too much in the recent election and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was a waste of time and energy.

Karen Schneider‘s paranoia and negativity about things like Google, EPA library closings, survival of small press publishers. Her purpose as a vision speaker was to stimulate debate and thought and I think she succeeded in that. I may not agree with her overall philosophy or approach to these issues but I think it is very healthy to step back and question some of the broader trends in librarianship and ask the hard questions about where they are leading us.

Brainstorming session intended to provide a forum for discussing the problem of reluctance on the part of members to run for office. I wish more people other than “old timers” had spoken up and that there had been more focus on concrete answers to the questions raised by the moderator (Katy Ginanni) and less on generalizations about “trust me, it is really, really good to serve on the Board.”

Dan Chudnov‘s emphasis on the need for simplicity in resource access and discovery. His reliance on iTunes as the standard for judging simplicity has many some flaws even if his general point is well taken. I especially liked his point about trying something out and tweaking it a little. That little tweak may pay off in huge dividends in terms of successful adoption of a new technology. I also think he has a great idea by proposing that libraries insert themselves into the realm of what he terms “service links.” These are available in just about every major media outlet on the web and commonly include links to Technorati, del.icio.us, and other social networking services.

Yet more assumptions about fellow librarians having or sharing the same — liberal — political approach and philosophy. E.g. several negative references to the current (Bush) administration, wearing t-shirt supporting a Democrat’s presidential candidacy, etc. Noticed Dan Chudnov’s reference in his speech to “liberal” vs. “right wing” — perhaps an unconscious but notable inflection of wording.

Importance of networking. I am not a social butterfly at all. In fact, lots of social interaction leaves me exhausted. (By contrast, others like my friend Beverley Geer get their energy from social interaction.) In spite of my natural shyness — some people tell me I come across as aloof — I keep trying to hone my skills and break down the barriers that hold me back from meeting new people. At NASIG this is easier for me to do than in some other situations. I enjoyed sitting next to people at the dine-arounds who were total strangers to me, conversing with them about their work, their interests, and issues of mutual concern. In this way I found out some really interesting details, such as the fact that one longtime NASIG member is an accomplished piano (and flute) player, with two Steinway grands. I learned a lot of interesting facts about the city of Houston from someone else, such as the fact that it had no zoning laws of any kind until relatively recently. Yet another conversation filled me in on what it is like as a foreign national to live in Johannesburg, South Africa (like living in a prison).

Discussion with a librarian from a university in the Southwest about what it’s like to have a non-librarian as library director and the drastic — good — changes brought about so that the library is once more popular with students as a destination.

Several mentions of “work / life balance.”

General recognition (I think) that ERMS are not working out well for many, at least not yet. I likened them to a solution in search of a problem in one open mic comment at a session and described my library’s very recent decision to get out of the vendor-supplied ERMS game altogether. There was some interest in open source solutions.

Each of us limited our remarks to 7-8 minutes at Anne’s request in order to maximize the question and answer time with the audience, which numbered around 150 people. That isn’t much time to both describe our backgrounds, why we made the career decisions that we did, and offer pertinent advice as to what it takes to work in an alternative library career.

If you’ve been in the world of libraries for any length of time you will know quite well that there are persistent stereotypes and divisions between various forms of librarianship. For instance, cataloging people and acquisitions people are always supposedly against each other, public services conflicts with technical services, professional librarians and paraprofessionals, and on and on. One of the deepest rooted of these is the continual reference to the “dark side” — meaning, working in the for profit sector. There are many people in this profession who feel that theirs is a higher, better calling if they work in a public or academic library, i.e. a non profit environment. Often there is a lack of respect shown to those who “dare” to look for better wages and sometimes more challenging work in the business world. (Thus the reference to the “dark side.”)

This session, then, was an opportunity to highlight some of the many positives, and negatives, about working for a vendor and in other alternative situations.

One of the things that came up during everyone’s presentations as well as during the Q&A session afterward, was this issue of the “dark side.” I think the highlight of the entire session was when Eve Davis, who works for EBSCO, stated: “We joke about the divide, yet we seem to be perpetuating that very thing by mentioning it so often. Why don’t we stop using terms like ‘the dark side’ even in jest?”

[Updated June 11, 2007: I realized after I had posted this that my narrative just ended without going into any further detail about the session's content, so what follows is what I meant to write originally.]

Here are some of the impressions or things I especially recall from what other presenters had to say:

• Several mentions by those on the panel of having a sense of impatience with the status quo. I thought this was interesting and noteworthy. Christine Stamison, for instance, talked about the process of implementing a new serials check-in form via a committee at The University of Chicago Library, and how that discussion took six months to come to a resolution. If I recall, she made some quip about how difficult it was to “turn the Queen Mary around.” I worked with Christine in the same environment and I can attest to the truthfulness of this observation. Sometimes things change too quickly in the for profit world, but it seems like all of the presenters preferred a faster pace of change and fewer meetings.
• Anne, Christine, Beverley, Mike, and Bob all spoke about the supposed glamour of travel, how it really wasn’t that glamorous after all. Mike illustrated this by mentioning the number of times he warmed his McDonald’s hamburger on top of his hotel room’s TV set. Christine mentioned the fact that this kind of work life can be really lonely, and that you have to have a strong sense of self, that you have to really like who you are. Bob mentioned how much he regrets that travel takes away from time with his family.
• MLS as union card. Beverley made this point, that in her view, the library degree is nothing more than a union card. That doesn’t mean it has no value (Anne also made this point); on the contrary, it establishes important common ground with clients. All of us agreed that we are librarians first and foremost. Anne mentioned, for example, filling out paperwork for her children’s school where she was asked to state her profession, and that she always answers the question with ‘librarian.’
• It was funny to learn that Bob’s first job out of library school was at a taco shack of some sort in Oregon (his home state).
• Support for professional involvement. Everyone on the panel agreed that they receive strong support for professional involvement from their employers. In some cases (and this has been my personal experience), such support is often stronger than what we would have received in an academic or public library. Christine mentioned that she requires everyone who reports to her to become NASIG members and to attend the conference each year.

Some of the points that I tried to make in my portion of the session:

• Be sure to build a record of accomplishment. Then be willing and able to articulate what you’ve done and how it benefits you in various situations. What I was thinking of here, but failed to say explicitly, was the need for project management skills. That is huge. In every job I’ve ever held, the ability to plan and execute projects has been critical.
• It’s not all about money. Yes, the grass is almost always greener on the for profit side of the fence. I pointed out that this was a motivating factor for seeking a job on “the dark side” (and I think this is true of the other panelists as well) but that it was far more important for me to have work that is challenging, fulfilling, and where I learn new things every day.
• It is really important to be a quick study, meaning, be willing to learn and learn quickly. I pointed out that many of the jobs I’ve held were ones for which I had no prior background, but that I was able to succeed in them because of working hard to learn all necessary skills.
• Have specific career goals in mind. Review them regularly, and understand that they may change over time. The example I gave was the difference in my career made by becoming a husband and father. When I was single, I devoted 95% of my time and energy to my career. Now that I have a family, they take precedence.

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¹ PAMS refers to Publication Access Management System, a class of vendor-supplied services that helps libraries manage the e-content to which they provide access.

However I wonder if the old adage, “If you build it, they will come” always applies? Just because we have a presence in these virtual spaces, does that guarantee that we will be successful in extending our libraries’ reach? I guess that the answer to that question obviously relates to how one defines success. Still, my personal experience in sites such as MySpace has been that when you build it, they (meaning friends or users or whatever you want to call them) don’t necessarily come. This is true even when I have spent time inviting many others directly to join. Even those whom I know already have an account in a particular service ignore an invitation, almost always. Even those who advertise that they would like to extend their network of friends, more often than not, ignore an invitation. Is this just me? Very possibly it is, and I can’t help but feel as a result like I’m back in high school again, an outsider who doesn’t belong in any particular clique and certainly not in the “popular” clique.

Setting the “me” factor aside, though, I think it is important for libraries who get involved in these virtual spaces to have accurate expectations or to have established clear goals for their outreach efforts. They need to continually evaluate how they are doing and work to improve their message or their content as needed. This is a fairly tall order and it requires a significant amount of dedicated time and energy. Yes, we need to get in there and take risks but we also need to be clear about any limits we might have in terms of longterm staffing. We also need to be clear about what we expect to get out of this kind of outreach and be willing to pull the plug if and when the investment doesn’t pan out.

There are 22 people in the class and as Mark Lindner remarked on his blog, this has the makings of an excellent group, with varied backgrounds and interests. (By the way, it was great to finally meet Mark in person! A great guy, and one whom I am pleased to work with.) Several students in the class work in public libraries; one works in a school library. As usual there are other students who have no library (let alone technical services) experience, and then there are those who have worked for several years in this area already. All of them bring valuable insights to class discussions.

This year I departed from the norm by having the class meet for part of a second day (usually one day is all we get; the rest of the semester is conducted entirely online). The main focus of this portion of the time together was on discussion about the tour and visit with UIUC technical services folks, followed by a crash course in setting up blogs and the class wiki. There may be some who found this new stuff a bit overwhelming, and that is to be expected. However I tried to point out the importance of getting involved, personally, in investigating these new forms of communication and collaboration. GSLIS has a technology platform for conducting online courses that has stood the test of time — 10 years, to be exact — very well, but there are many aspects that need to be updated. The tech support folks are wonderful, incredible people. They already have begun investigating and testing a new platform for conducting classes, called Moodle (it’s open source to boot). Two of the LEEP courses this summer are using this new platform, which contains built-in support for wikis, blogging capabilities, RSS, etc. For the technical services course I teach, I have had to go outside of the bounds of the LEEP technology to integrate blogs. I chose WordPress.com as the best overall platform for a balance of ease of setup and use as well as a rich set of features (and of course, it is free). A general class blog is now operational and most students have successfully set up individual blogs as well. One of the main assignments of this course is what I’ve termed a reflective journal. It struck me that this assignment would make a perfect match with blogging technology, and it would have the secondary benefit of helping to generate and sustain conversations about themes in the course in ways that a generic bulletin board setup could not. This is all somewhat experimental of course, and we’ll see how people take to the new stuff. So far, I am really pleased.

Oh, one other new tool that I am excited about in terms of teaching this course is the new ability I have to do application sharing via another open source software called Web Huddle. This will make introducing students to ERMS, for instance, much more fruitful than, say, a PowerPoint presentation.

Now I’ve got to prepare more for tomorrow’s first online “live” session, on the topic of acquisitions and collection development. Unfortunately I have had serious problems with connecting to the GSLIS server from my workplace, such that I am forced to conduct tomorrow’s session from home, where there isn’t aren’t such tight restrictions on network traffic!

In a Slashdot posting read this a.m., entitled “Why Everyone Loves Apple,” I found some words that I think are very relevant to libraries, technology, debates about Library 2.0, Web 2.0, you name it. Here is the particular sentence I found to be so “right on the mark”:

“It’s regrettably amusing that Apple competitors are working hastily to develop iPod clones to reap in success, but what many of them fail to comprehend is that it’s not necessarily the iPod that makes Apple successful, but rather its customer service.”

Moving this into the library realm, what this basically is saying is, It’s all about customer service, folks! We can (and I think we should) investigate and implement relevant new technologies in libraries as much as possible. But if these new technologies or technology services don’t really enhance customer service, then we are deluding ourselves. Sure, it is cool and hip to have iPods available for checkout, or to encourage gaming, or to develop RSS feeds for everything. But are those things really, truly enhancing customer service? In many cases, I’m sure the answer is, Yes. But not in all cases. Library users aren’t all dissatisfied and turned off about technological backwardness, poor OPACs, or whatever. Don’t forget the users who use libraries for, um, books. Print books. Print journals. Print newspapers.

Let’s not forget that while the energy and excitement currently displayed in the biblioblogosphere (boy, I hate that word) over new technologies is generally very positive, it needs to be critically assessed in light of local library user needs.

Oh, and by the way, there are many people who don’t like Apple. And Apple has not done everything right; they’ve made many big mistakes. But I think libraries can learn from the Apple lesson that libraries are largely about the user experience, and that the single most important factor in user satisfaction is the perceived level of service they receive.

“Volunteer organizations are strange creatures. They run off the drive and energy of the terminally overcommitted, so there are never really enough resources to bring to bear.”

This tickled my funny bone because I’ve been there, done that. The time I spent on the board of NASIG was incredibly worthwhile and I will be forever grateful for that experience. Yet I can say that T. Scott’s observations are spot on. I remember attending my first NASIG board meeting as a visitor (newly elected vice-president/president-elect) at the NASIG annual conference at the University of Michigan. Like T. Scott at the MLA board meeting, this was an illuminating experience.

I don’t care what anyone tells you, being president of NASIG is no less work than a full time job (or in some leadership capacity in whatever volunteer organization). It was incredibly stressful and required that a lot of time be devoted to the organization. As an aside, it’s interesting to note the similarities between NASIG and the Medical Library Association given the huge disparity in membership dues between the two volunteer organizations. NASIG charges $75 (and there are variations on dues depending on your status, e.g. students get a lower rate, and location, e.g. those who live in Canada or Mexico pay less in US dollars) whereas the Medical Library Association charges $165 for regular members. And NASIG used to charge $20-25 from its inception in 1985 ’til last year, when the dues were raised significantly for the first time.
Anyway, getting back to the workload issue for volunteer organizations… Given the fact that we all have “real” jobs, T. Scott writes:

“Frankly, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all.”

Still, it is worth it. My NASIG involvement has been incredibly important to my growth as a librarian. Friends I made 15 years ago remain friends to this day, and many new ones have been made along the way. I particularly agree with T. Scott’s closing statement in his post, and it holds true for most volunteer organizations that I know of:

“It is, after all, an association. A gathering of people committed to working together to achieve some things they can’t achieve on their own. Sometimes we’re successful, sometimes we fail. Always our reach exceeds our grasp. I like it that way.”

I like it that way, too.

One of the tasks before me in this new year is to finally come to a decision, one way or another, about pursuing a PhD in library and information science. (I’ve considered some alternative areas of study but none really seems to catch my interest and passions the way librarianship does.) My boss strongly encourages me to pursue this and in fact, in order to achieve tenure I will have to pursue a second master’s degree, at least. Other factors that are in favor of doing this are that my institution will provide significant financial support, and they also will provide me with time off.

But am I really capable of doing this? I’m filled with doubt. Am I smart enough, motivated enough, good enough? We’re talking about the world’s worst procrastinator, and one of the worst students around. Plus, how can I devote the necessary focus and energy when I have a young family? I have no desire to sacrifice their needs for this career move. What if I fail? (I’ve failed in so many other areas, professionally.) Ok, ok, I know, I’m supposed to stay POSITIVE this year…

Just one example: A few weeks ago, I had cleaned out my email inbox. In the process, I had successfully dealt with or deleted several hundred emails that had sat there for months. It is now two weeks later and my inbox is full yet again, so full as to be overwhelming. Ah, the tyranny of electronic communication…

Perhaps the best way to communicate my current mood is by quoting from one of my favorite books and one of my favorite literary characters, Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring, who mentions to Gandalf: “Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.”