Tag Archives: The University of Chicago

New library building at The University of Chicago

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After I posted information about the latest issue of The University of Chicago Library’s newsletter, I found out that a new library building — not simply an automated storage facility as previously understood — is now being planned. The new library building will be realized with a $25 million gift and will be named The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library in honor of the donors. Joe Mansueto is founder of Morningstar, Inc. Check out drawings and links to more information here. Most of it will be underground, with the main visual clue to its location being a large dome sitting immediately to the west of the Regenstein Library where I used to work for a number of years. What’s interesting about this whole development is that U of C will hold a fairly distinct place among large academic and research libraries in that all physical collections will be housed on campus, whereas most other peer institutions have resorted to offsite storage. Oh and by the way, the new building was designed by Helmut Jahn. Pretty cool!

Spring 2008 issue of LIBRA from The University of Chicago Library

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I was glad to see the Spring 2008 issue of The University of Chicago Library’s newsletter, LIBRA, published this afternoon. This publication’s official audience is University faculty, students, and staff but it always provides an interesting glimpse into the Library’s workings and initiatives for those not affiliated with the University. This latest issue describes, for example, the reincarnation of the Eero Saarinen-designed D’Angelo Law Library into a 21st century space with emphasis on online resources and collaborative, inviting work space. This issue also contains an essay from Judy Nadler, director, that articulates her views on her participation in the Working Group for the Future of Bibliographic Control. This group’s work has been hotly debated and intensely scrutinized in the international library community so it is good to hear one representative’s perspectives about it. Another interesting article in this issue relates to a project called Project Bamboo, which I hadn’t heard about before.

Some cataloging history

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The other day I finally had a look at a site that I knew about for a while but had never visited: The Virtual Museum of Cataloging and Acquisition Artifacts, maintained by a library school professor (I think, at the Univ. of South Carolina). I entered the library profession in 1992 so a lot of this, you would think, would be unknown to me. Not so. At The University of Chicago, I well remember many such artifacts being used well into the mid-1990s and, for all I know, still being used today. I remember electric pencils, manual typewriters, the old Cutter-Sanborn tables, and much, much more. One of the things I vividly remember is the old, clunky integrated library system still in use there in the early days of my career: LDMS (stands for Library Data Management System). One of the things that will always stay in my mind when I think of LDMS were the copious staff notes made in serial records by a previous librarian there, Helen Schmierer. (I think Helen may still be active in the profession but I’m not sure where.) Then too, how can I forget the entirely paper-based serial record for active and inactive print subscriptions? And the large, clunky Dieboldt machine that housed the inactive journal subscription records? And the card catalog and the paper shelflist? And the many interesting old cards written in library hand? Yes, there were courses in library school that taught one how to write in “library hand.” And don’t forget the knowledge one had to have of various filing rules. Those were the good old days, may they never come again…

One thing I plan to do is add the link to this site to the list of things my students are to review this summer when I will be teaching Technical Services Functions online again at UIUC GSLIS.

GSLIS publications digitized

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I was excited to find out that some important publications from UIUC GSLIS are now digitized and available in UIUC’s institutional repository, IDEALS. These include:

Allerton Park Institute Proceedings(1954-1997)
Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (1963-1995)
Occasional Papers (1949-2004)

These are highly important publications in terms of recent library history, and it is great that they are now readily available like this. I know that the Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing in particular discussed important, cutting edge development around MARC and early integrated library systems (including NOTIS from Northwestern University Library and LDMS from The University of Chicago Library), and that you can’t get a complete picture of library automation history without reading papers presented there. Take a look at http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/154.

(Found out via message from Sue Searing, LIS librarian, to GSLIS faculty earlier today. )

Lens @ UChicago

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I was excited to finally get a peek at the University of Chicago Library‘s experimental new search interface for their catalog, which they’ve named Lens.  Basically it’s a souped up or customized version of Aquabrowser.  I have only just started to poke through it but visually and functionally, it looks great.  Those who attend Code4Lib 2008 might get a chance (if the program proposal is approved) to hear Tod Olson @ UChicago and someone from Aquabrowser talk about the work they did with it.

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.

The power and peril of blogs

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I have been a little bemused by the many posts and comments on library-related blogs in the past week that mention NASIG. Great exposure, right? Right, except that most of them seem to have focused on one person’s informal writeup of one particular session that discussed the role of columnists in library journals in a world increasingly dominated by blogs. Anna Creech (Eclectic Librarian) provides a bit more perspective of what was said, which is good, especially since she was there. I mention bemusement because frankly a lot of what has been written seems to me to be a little too quick to judge and especially, a little too quick to assume an “us (bloggers, the good people) vs. them (those evil, skulking column people who are fearful of bloggers)” perspective. Behold, the power — and peril — of blogs.

Let me make it clear, first of all, that I wasn’t there for the presentation. I wish I had been. What I write here is simply the result of reading various posts about “the incident.” For those who don’t know to what I refer, “the incident” involved a presentation at this year’s NASIG conference that apparently had some negative (and perhaps unfair) comparisons to make between columns in print library literature and information derived from blogs.

Second, my general point here is, calm down folks and try to get some perspective! T. Scott Plutchak writes about this in his blog and combines this perspective with discussion of another controversial blog post by Michael Gorman. T. Scott’s tone is welcome. He also makes the following point:

“We are really still at the very beginnings of figuring out the best ways to engage in discourse using all of these new tools.”

I think this is true, but one could imply from that statement that what we are experiencing in the blogging world is radically different than what we have long experienced in other forms of discourse. (Also, T. Scott seems to question — and I think rightly so — the prevalence of written responses to Gorman’s post that attack him personally. This isn’t new; a few years ago the same thing happened in response to another Gorman statement, and it also happened in a discussion about Indiana’s library school dean.) I don’t think that the struggle to figure out “the best ways to engage in discourse” is something new to blogging. One only has to attend a few scholarly conferences to put the blogging discourse into perspective. It is not uncommon to see faculty presenting papers with opposing viewpoints devolve into very thinly veiled personal attacks as the papers are discussed. I saw a few such scholarly conference exchanges firsthand when at The University of Chicago. It was entertaining at times, but also disconcerting.

One thing that is a little different, though, is the speed and the ease with which such discourse can be articulated, disseminated, interpreted, and reacted to in the world of blogs. And then reworded, or re-articulated, or re-interpreted, or re-reacted to (bad English, I know), again and again until the discourse peters out.

Here is a list of the various blog postings I’ve read about “the incident” just for the record. And be sure to also look at comments for all of them:

Eat-Your-Vegetables librarianship alive and well (metaProjects)

Out of Context or Being a Hypocrite (A Wandering Eyre)

Authority, Formality, Reality, Hypocrisy (Walt at Random)

since when did this become a column? (Eclectic Librarian)

Still in the incunabula stage (T. Scott)

If I’ve missed any others, please add a comment to this post letting me know.

The "dark side" discussion [Updated]

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The main reason I was able to go to NASIG this year was that Anne McKee, program officer for the Greater Western Library Alliance (apparently known as GWLA, pronounced “Gwilla”), kindly invited me to participate in a panel discussion about alternative library careers for serialists. I jumped at the chance to present with friends and colleagues including Anne, Christine Stamison, Beverley Geer, Mike Markwith, and Bob Schatz. Anne represented consortia (the aformentioned GWLA), Christine brought the perspective of working for a subscription agent (Swets), Beverley with a journal publisher (Sage), Mike had a subscription agent (WT Cox) as well as PAMS1 background (TDNet), Bob represented book vendors (Coutts), and I came with a background working for a ILS vendor (Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., now Ex Libris Group) and in a corporate library.

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.

Breaking news: CIC libraries to join Google Book project

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Just got an email from UIUC informing me that the libraries of the CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation — the Big 10 universities plus The University of Chicago) have signed a formal agreement to participate in the Google Book Search project. See the formal announcement here. Very interesting news!

My del.icio.us bookmarks for April 6th through April 16th

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These are my links for April 6th through April 16th: