Tag Archives: Steven Bell

Am I where I should be professionally?

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Steven Bell is a fellow librarian whom I’ve never met but whose voice is strong, reasoned, and influential for me.  I think he wrote his best blog post to date when he discussed how he has gotten to his current position in the library world, and points out the hills and valleys that we all must go through to be where we want to be.

Steven and I apparently share a few things in our histories, more than just our first name.  One of those things is that both of us went straight to library school after completing our undergrad programs.  By now I feel over the hill, but like Steven, I was only 23 when I started my first job as a serials cataloger at The University of Chicago.  It was my first professional job but also my first full time job, ever.  Looking back, I was incredibly young and naive.  I wonder how my colleagues there put up with me.  Fortunately some of them seemed to see something worth cultivating, otherwise I wouldn’t be where I am today.  That first supervisor can be so critical, positive or negative, in the early days of a career.  As I’ve noted many times before, I was really fortunate to have an excellent supervisor who pushed me to excel and made sure I had opportunities to do so.

I’ve been in this career for 16 years and at times I still wonder about the same thing:  Am I where I should be professionally?  If I had done this or that differently, would I be a director of some library somewhere by now?  Do I even really want to be a senior administrator of a library any more?  Many colleagues look at my varied career path and openly wonder about all of the changes and the variations in library settings I’ve been in.  Even in this day and age of great mobility in terms of jobs (geographically and otherwise), it seems like most of my friends have stayed in the same library where they started, or at least have stayed in the same type of library (e.g. academic) throughout their career.  I’ve jumped around quite a bit.

There have definitely been peaks with a lot of valleys mixed in.  I still feel uncertain as to whether I have done all I should have done, accomplished what I should have accomplished, thus far.  I see other people my own age or younger who have advanced far more probably than I ever could hope for, in a shorter period of time.  I worry that I have burned too many bridges, been too vocally critical, too willing to push for change or to seek out change, too lax in completing things I’ve promised to do.

However, one of the things that tends to come with advancement in age is perspective.  Maybe I could have and should have done better in my career.  No doubt about that.  However, I am where I am and that’s fine for now.  I have made a ton of mistakes and I have questioned — so many times — whether I really wanted to stay in the library profession at all.  About four years ago I thought for sure that I would be able to pursue a PhD in LIS, a dream of mine for many years.  Circumstances have changed and I doubt that will ever happen.  I am more at peace with all of that now.  I know I am lucky to have any kind of job at all.  It may not be what I envisioned for myself years ago.  But I am thankful for it.

As Steven mentions in his post, family can play a huge part in defining or shaping a career.  The biggest change for me of course is that I have been blessed to become a family man.  My wife and children take first place, always.

I particularly noted Steven’s mention of the exposure that blogs provide for librarians.  I think this is quite true and that we need to step back once in a while and see how very different (and for the most part, better) our library world is now than, say, 10 or 15 years ago.

Visibility of library on organizational websites

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It has always bothered me when a link to the library of a particular organization is not prominently featured on the home page of its website. This is particularly bothersome for educational institutions given the de facto role of the library as a centerpiece of learning. In fact when I browse the web or go directly to a known institution and do not see a prominent link to the library, this gives me a bad impression of that institution. In a previous job when I was responsible for library websites, the issue of placement for the link to the library was a battle that I had to fight with non-library campus IT folks, and fight fairly aggressively. In the campus website that existed when I came into that position, the link to the library was buried somewhere in a category for Academics, if I recall. Noone could find it. This, in spite of the fact that the library site was one of the most heavily used in the entire campus web structure. Fortunately after a campus website redesign, the link to the library was placed prominently on the home page for the institution.

So it was with a lot of interest that I read Steven Bell’s summary, posted to ACRLog, of a discussion on the COLLIB-L discussion list regarding this issue. One portion of Bell’s post particularly caught my attention:

Tom Kirk, library director at Earlham College, also brought up the value of examining web site data, but made the observation that data alone would hardly yield the information we need about student behavior in using institutional and library web sites. Until we do know more about how students use our web sites, Tom said, we may be unjustified in arguing for what belongs on a home page. As for alternatives, Tom suggested that many of our institutions have specialized portals for communicating with current students and faculty, where a more prominent library link could be placed. He also suggested that having the library under “academics” has “become a de facto standard alternative to a link on the home page?” So if they do move your library link from the home page to academics, don’t take it too badly.

This statement from Tom Kirk frankly astounds me, especially the part about having the library under “academics” being the “de facto standard.” Not true! And even if it is fairly common, I vehemently disagree that we should be satisfied with that! Furthermore, we should and often do have the data to back up the assertion that the link to the library belongs on the institution’s home page. And we should and do have data on how our students are using our sites. I would ask the question, are other campus wide sites being asked to adhere to this same requirement? Maybe, but in many cases, I doubt it, based upon personal experience.

One more point I’d make is that the library is not just for students, it’s for the whole institution including faculty, staff, and alumni. Even more than that, it is for the broader worldwide academic community. In other words, library websites, especially for educational institutions, have a worldwide audience and this is often overlooked. I mention this because one of the arguments I faced when in charge of library websites was to keep the library websites publicly available versus putting them behind a firewall and accessible only via an intranet. The argument for this restriction (made by non-library IT people) was that library resources and information was only for existing students, faculty, and staff, so therefore it needn’t be available to anyone else. Of course this is true when we think of licensed e-resources but this approach would make the library’s online catalog and other freely available resources invisible to anyone else.

I am not arguing that the library website deserves high visibility “just because.” But I find it troubling that the library’s online presence needs to be defended so often, and that there is frequently an assumption that the link to the library should be buried somewhere within an institution’s site.