Making Time

I read around a lot on the various librarian blogs that discuss keeping up or learning new things, especially techie things. This is one I like that discusses both the how and the why of keeping up. The reasons to change are many, and I’ve discussed before that to persuade librarians to adapt to new technologies, one has to show how it benefits them somehow. I try to do this by highlighting the way new technologies can save one time or effort.

The “why” is difficult enough, and the “how” might be even harder. A lot of librarians recommend things like “set aside 15 minutes a day to learn new things,” or they’ll recommend spending some time before opening the morning email to play around with new technology. Some librarians complain that they just don’t have the time to keep up with all this new stuff, and the “15 minutes a day” approach is to show how easy it can be.

I have no problem with recommending this sort of approach, but I don’t think it will do much, for a couple of reasons. First, that’s generally not how those of us kept-up people keep up. Just spending the time reading around on what’s going on takes up more of my time that that, not counting actually playing around with new stuff. If I find out about some new tool I think might be interesting or useful, I usually just immerse myself in it until I learn how to do it, at least at a novice level. That usually takes more than 15 minutes, but I don’t think about the time because I like doing it and I think it’s worthwhile.

Secondly, time is not necessarily the problem, despite the complaints of a lot of librarians. Sure, a lot of librarians work hard, but how many really spend 8 hours a day completely on task? That means without reading the news, or shopping online, or gossiping with their officemates, or any of a variety of other ways people can kill time. Librarians already spend at least some time doing other things, else they would end up like those factory workers in Modern Times, the ones who stop chasing the little tramp and get back to work every time he turns the conveyor belt back on. Drudgery doesn’t make good librarians.

The difference between these librarians and some of us more kept-up librarians isn’t that some of us work like we’re in a library sweatshop and others of us just goof off playing around with social software or something. It’s a difference of priorities. Some people like online shopping or gossiping. I like playing around with new stuff, so that’s one way I break up my work day to keep myself sane. I even do it at home, because I enjoy it. Along with other things, this explains why, for me at least, “work” is no longer identified with a single location.

Also, I suspect it’s sometimes a matter of definition concerning what is library work and what isn’t, which is why the rationale has to be there. I could learn how to to do something new that might benefit library users or make office communication more efficient, or I could do something that seems more “library-like,” especially as libraries were in time past.

It could be a matter of definition, but ultimately I think it’s more a matter of temperament than anything else. A lot of librarians just don’t enjoy learning new things, especially techie things. Perhaps learning is just too slow and painful, and keeping up with the bare minimum seems too much of an effort. Eventually, there won’t be librarians like this, because I don’t see how many people uncomfortable with change could enter the profession these days. But for the time being, we need to persuade people that some changes benefit them and their libraries, and then we won’t have to worry about making time to learn new things. People make time for what they enjoy and what they think important.

WorldCat Selection

To give you an idea of how exciting my job often is, I’ll tell you about the professional highlight of my week. Today I trained on the new WorldCat Selection service, and I’m all set up to use it.

Many of you might already know about WorldCat Selection. It’s an online collection development tool that brings records from multiple vendors into a single interface and allows selection and ordering all in one place. This may not sound like a big deal, but it’s sure going to save me a lot of time and make it easier for me to spend more money. That last part might be tough on my budget, though.

I’ve been waiting for this for about two years, ever since I’d heard we were talking to Cornell about using their Integrated Tool for Selection and Ordering (ITSO) system. Cornell teamed up with OCLC, and we’re all the beneficiaries.

I like it, especially because I hate the traditional model. Mountains of paper slips come in. I select a bunch of them. Handwrite my initials and a fund code. Send the smaller mountain of slips to acquisitions, where they they pile up on the desk of some poor acquisition staff person who probably feels completely overwhelmed having to manually enter all the info. It’s no wonder traditional acquisitions could be so slow and inefficient. I’ve been fighting against this model since I started working here, trying to do as much electronically as I could.

I buy English, German, French, and Italian books in philosophy and religion, and we have approval profiles set up with Blackwells for Anglo-American, Harrassowitz for German, Touzot for French, and Casalini for Italian. Blackwells’ Collection Manager is a decent ordering system, and since I’ve been struggling for years to get rid of the mountain of paper slips that pile up in my mailbox I started using it as soon as I could. Harrassowitz started delivering slips by email, which is better than paper, but you still have to copy and paste to order. I abandoned French slips and I’ve been periodically searching the Touzot database by certain parameters to generate my own electronic slips and avoid paper. There was nothing I could do about Casalini. My system’s hardly been ideal, but my choice was between that and a couple thousand paper slips coming to me each month. I’ve never understood the selectors who’d rather have the mountain of paper.

But no longer. Harrassowitz, Touzot, and Casalini are already in WorldCat Selection, and I’ve been told to expect Blackwells within a month or so. I can go in, see all the records from all three (soon four) vendors, select the ones I want to order and delete the rest, all with a few clicks. Right now there aren’t many vendors involved, but I assume the number will grow.

The interface is a little clunky, but our test group says OCLC has been very responsive to suggestions for improvements and it’s getting better quickly. For example, you can’t manage your approval profiles, as you can with Collection Manager. It would be great if OCLC could work with the vendors to include that in the interface. Also, the sorting right now is based on the Dewey numbers from the vendor records, which isn’t as useful for me as LC would be. You can set up a lot of exclusions (e.g., of keywords or languages), but it would be nice to be able to add keywords to the profile. For example, I would like to see everything with “philosophy” in the subject heading. It would also be nice to get separate email notices when new records have been loaded, which is something I like about Collection Manager. It’s a good reminder for me. There are other suggestions for improvement I could probably offer. Still, I think it’s going to be a useful tool, and I expect it to improve. It’s one small step towards Collection Development 2.0. (I can’t believe I just wrote that.)

My Harrassowitz, Touzot, and Casalini slips for this week have been loaded. The only problem is that I now have 400 records to look through.

The Juvenal of Librarianship

I’m currently writing an article about the Annoyed Librarian and her role in debates within librarianship. In fact, I just finished it yesterday and after finishing, I started reading some library blogs. Imagine my astonishment as I went through the feeds in my Google Reader list and discovered that everyone seemed to be writing about the Annoyed Librarian at the same time. Just of the blogs I subscribe to, the AL and her recent post on the Cult of Twopointopia was a topic of discussion at David Lee King, Free Range Librarian, Librarian.net, Library Stuff, Information Wants to Be Free, and Tennant: Digital Libraries.

Of the various criticisms, I think Meredith Farkas’ and Steven Cohen’s come closest to my own opinion, but since I have been thinking about the topic a lot recently, I wanted to put forward what I recently concluded in general about the Annoyed Librarian and what she offers to debates in librarianship. Of course, I might be wrong.

The Annoyed Librarian, at least writing as the Annoyed Librarian, definitely represents the extreme position of whatever debate she enters. In the political battles, she is completely against the SRRT and offers no compromise, much like some of her critics. Her criticisms of the ALA, Internet pornography in libraries, the alleged librarian shortage, the banned books movement, and the Library 2.0 phenomenon have been relentless. Many have taken her arguments at face value and wondered why anyone who was so aggressively opposed to so much in librarianship would remain a librarian. On the other hand, many of her regular readers provide a cheering section and seem to agree with just about everything she writes. As a regular reader, I am somewhere in the middle, mostly because I recognize, or at least I think I recognize, what she is trying to do. Since she has no professional reputation to make and writes pseudonymously, she does not need to be consistent. She does not need to be polite. Yes, the positions the AL takes on various issues are often extreme, I think designedly so. She offers the most extreme argument she can muster against whatever annoys her at the moment, and this very extremity helps to clarify a problem. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein says somewhere that his philosophical work attempts to sweep away the debris that accumulates around philosophical arguments so that we may see them clearly. This, it seems to me, is also what the extremity of the AL’s positions does to debates within librarianship. By posing her arguments in the starkest terms, she often shows what is really at stake in a debate, then lets others wrestle with those arguments to come to a more sensible middling position. Even for her staunchest opponents, she often presents strong arguments they would do well to consider.

While clearing away the debris, she is often satirical as well. In a profession sometimes given to uncritical and humorless jingoism, the AL provides an antidote with her satire. But satire has a purpose; it does not exist merely to make people laugh. Satire aims to correct abuses, and it is often extreme. Consider, for example, Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal.” Some satire is gentle, and some harsh. We usually categorize gentle satire as Horatian. While the AL does sometimes adhere to the Horatian dictum to teach and delight, her satire is far from gentle. No, it is more Juvenalian, exposing abuses with biting wit and moral indignation. Juvenalian satire is so alien to the profession of librarianship that many readers do not understand what is going on. How could someone be so bitter? Why doesn’t she stop criticizing people and go do something else? Why does she remain a librarian? These are responses to her work that I have seen, but these responses miss the point. Some seem to think this Juvenalian satire from the Annoyed Librarian is a sign that she thinks librarianship is worthless, and that she should thus cease to be a librarian. But that shows a misunderstanding of the moral purpose of satire. We do not satirize that which is beneath contempt or that which is unimportant. We satirize abuses to things that we value. The moral purpose of satire is to criticize vice to protect the virtues of things we love. Considered in this way, it is just possible that far from finding librarianship or librarians or even the ALA worthless, the Annoyed Librarian instead considers them very important, important enough to be saved from the follies that sometimes beset them.