Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

More on the Humanities

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Steve Lawson left a comment on my Some Things Don’t Change post that I tried to respond to in another comment, but the comment started to get away from me, so I decided to make it a post. As you’ve no doubt noticed, I have trouble writing briefly. Sorry about that. Thanks for reading anyway.

The comment:

“I agree with many of the things you say, especially about not simply assuming that students are different and that they humanities must change to accommodate their perceived characteristics.

But, like Dan Cohen, I feel like digital collections and tools will make humanities scholarship different in the future, at least for some scholars. (An important difference is that Dan Cohen is actually helping this to come about, while I’m mostly looking on from the sidelines.) Do you not think that humanities scholarship will change significantly? Or do you think that such scholarship won’t be truly humanistic?”

First, thanks for introducing me to a new blog that could be interesting.

Regarding digital collections and tools, I definitely believe they are already changing the practices of some scholars. One thing I’ve been thinking about is the relative ease of collaborative work now and whether that will ever have much of an effect on scholarship, since humanists tend to discuss in public but write alone. The pirate post was discussing how the practice of the historian might have to change to accommodate some digital collections, but I don’t see it is a huge change in the underlying mission of historians. It’s still trying to interpret texts to understand and tell a story about the past. If digital tools increase our ability to do that, so much the better. The result will still be a modern and humanist sort of history that considers texts in context and as part of a linear history, unlike the medieval historical worldview and more like the break with it that came with events like proving the Donation of Constantine bogus.

Things I see as essential to the humanities that haven’t changed since the Renaissance: a concern with texts and arguments trying to understand the human condition and guide us to appropriate behavior; an understanding of history as a linear development; a commitment to the development of individual character, rationality, capacity, etc; and a belief in the centrality of language to what makes us thinking beings.

There are now and have always been large swaths of human belief that go against this. There are, paradoxically, anti-humanist humans. Just confining ourselves to America, there are apparently huge numbers of people who believe in a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis and that the earth is about 6,000 years old. I don’t actually know any of these people, but the fear they seem to inspire in others seems to indicate that such people must exist somewhere. These pre-modernists still have the theologico-historical worldview that began to disappear from intellectual discourse about 500 years ago. They see the world more like Augustine saw it than like any modern thinker would. For them, texts are not part of contexts and history is linear only to the extent that it moves from creation to apocalypse.

Obviously, there also exist trends and behaviors that go against the individuality inherent in the humanities. Humanists have always valued developing the capacity of individual human beings–their critical thought, their artistic abilities, etc. The goal has always been to create intelligent and thoughtful individuals, and not to immerse the individual into the group. The renaissance man, as it were. We still respect this goal, and are rightly impressed with people who are accomplished in many areas. A concern with humanity and the larger world is always part of this education, but not the whole of it. However, there are many who believe that the goal of education should be to produce competent and compliant workers, or compliant subjects of a particular political regime, or something like this. Such indoctrination (one hesitates to call it education) is at odds with the individualism inherent in the humanities, which should strive to create individuals who maximize their own potential while understanding themselves as beings in the world. There are all sorts of collectivist notions that are unremittingly anti-humanistic.

Some writers argue that children today are growing up in a visual culture that is at odds with the traditions of humanistic education. These kids, we are told, spend all their time playing video games, watching television, texting their friends, posting photos to Facebook, and all at the same time. They don’t read. They don’t write. That’s just not important anymore. However, the mass of humanity has always been like this (as in not reading or writing, rather than playing video games and Facebooking). If you want to see a great example of a visual culture with little literacy, take a look at the Middle Ages. The extravagant windows and carvings of medieval cathedrals are the medieval equivalent of the television documentary, a way to deliver a message to people who won’t or can’t read. Illiteracy (either inability or unwillingness to read or write) has always characterized the greater part of humanity. We’re no different today except that we have more distractions that move more quickly. But the humanist contends that to think critically, to understand ourselves and the world we inhabit, to communicate with each other meaningfully, to merge our shared understandings of existence in fruitful ways, will always require language and writing. There’s only so far one’s thoughts can progress without some sort of language, whether this is ordinary human language for most things, or a specialized mathematical language for others.

So, to make a short comment long, I think that as long as people are trying to understand and interpret texts in context, focus on the development of the individual person within the larger world, and communicate their ideas through language and writing, then they will be practicing humanistic scholarship. Obviously there are all sorts of other worthwhile human endeavors, but if the humanities disappear completely the world will be a darker place.

Nothing Personal, Folks

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I looked at my stats today and noticed that a lot of readers this week have been coming from the University of Chicago domain and entering on my post about the Regenstein and Harold Washington libraries. While I always welcome new readers, it’ll be 10 clicks in a row from different IP addresses, as if someone sent out an email saying, “hey, did you see what this jerk said about our library!”

I would just like to say that I still feel the same way about the library, but it’s nothing personal, just in case you were sensitive enough to take it personally. Unless you were the architect, which is highly unlikely, nothing I said about the library is a comment upon anything other than perhaps your aesthetic sense, and in that we’ll just have to agree to disagree. De gustibus non est disputandum, after all. However, I thought I would say some nice things as well. While I didn’t like Regenstein, I like the University of Chicago, precisely because it’s the place where fun goes to die and has a surfeit of intellectual students. I’m sure the librarians there are all great. I have a friend from library school who works there, and I like and respect her (Hi, B!). It’s one of the few universities that could possibly ever attract me back to the Midwest, and I like the Midwest. I had lunch today with someone who was a professor there for many years, and after I described my daughter’s school and some of her interests, he said it sounded like she might be the kind of kid who’d be happy at Chicago someday, which would be fine with me if I could afford it. And, by the way, he likes Regenstein.

While I’m at it, I’ll mention another library very close to Chicago, the main library at Northwestern (Hi, M!), the one that looks like a turtle. You know what? I don’t like that one, either, and I think it won some sort of architecture award. Which reminds me, the library at Gettysburg College (where I worked for two years) also won an award. It looks funny and is entirely too dark on the inside, plus there aren’t enough restrooms. These libraries always win awards, but the awards are always from architects and not librarians.The Dickinson College Library has a nice entrance, but weird service points if I recall correctly.

The old stacks at the Main Library at UIUC is the scariest library space I’ve ever been in. My entire first year in grad school I was afraid to go in them because I was afraid I’d get lost and they’d find me a month later dead in a corner somewhere. In addition, they were absolutely opposed to my plan to spread breadcrumbs behind myself so I could find my way out. They were afraid the breadcrumbs would attract too many starving humanities grad students and the place would be chaos. Helluva library, though.

What can I say, I have high standards for library buildings. I like entrances to be grand. I was impressed the first time I walked into the main New York Public Library on 42nd St. No books, but what a staircase! Felt the same way when I walked into the Widener Library at Harvard. Loved all that marble. Then I walked into Lamont and it brought me back down. And when I get inside them, I like light evenly spread throughout the room. No dark shadows. No sickly florescent glow like the opening scenes of Joe Versus the Volcano. Add in concerns about weird uses of space and not enough comfy seats and dark stacks, and very few library buildings impress me.

And Firestone Library? Well, I like the outside, the reference room, and the atrium. It’s probably not politic to talk about the rest, though it will finally be renovated over the next few years and we’ll see. As for our branches, we’ve got a beautiful Art Library. We’ve got another branch library, Not the Art Library, that always stirs thoughts of suicide in sensitive souls. Criticize away. I won’t take it personally.

Some Things Don’t Change

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If you keep track of library blogs (and if you’re reading this you probably do), then you’re no doubt aware of the many devoted to change and innovation. Sometimes these blogs come across as pessimistic meditations on how libraries will fade away if we don’t change quickly (I find those tedious), and sometimes they’re more cheerful and want to bring good things to librarians and library users (though sometimes a bit too fluffy for me, these are the ones I usually learn something from). There’s a similar thread in the library literature, and I have a small pile of articles on my desk urging librarians to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and savvy patrons–in the case of academic libraries, especially “millennial” patrons who are supposedly so tech-savvy and advanced. I’ve written before that I’m not at all sure our younger users are really ahead of us (or at least me) technologically, which is why studies showing that students aren’t particularly “web wise” don’t surprise me. I also resist the gloomy librarians who think that libraries are nearly extinct. Libraries are far from dead, which to me implies that the urgency of change rhetoric is a bit overblown. Another signal that the change rhetoric may be too hyperbolic is that some things haven’t changed at all and probably won’t for a very long time.

Just to put things in some perspective, I want to discuss something that hasn’t changed much: humanistic study. I work in the humanities, and humanists have been doing roughly the same sort of work for 500 years and show little sign of stopping. 500 years. Think about that. Since the late 15th century in Italy, when humanists began to define themselves against the reigning scholasticism of the universities and study classical literature from a secular perspective, their activity has been more or less the same. They read, write, edit, and respond to texts through texts, especially the treatise and the essay, genres still going strong today among humanists. They write on topics relevant to the human condition. One can read the philosophy or history from that period on and recognize it as something distinctively modern, and as something that we still more or less do, sometimes better and sometimes worse. The subtitle of this blog recalls the topics of the Renaissance era studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. These are among the liberal arts, so called because they were and are by many still believed to be appropriate studies for the development of free persons.

Technology changes. Nations rise and fall. Scholarly languages go in and out of fashion. Attitudes and values shift. The humanities remain the same, a living tradition of the best that has been thought and said the world over, a scholarly conversation begun in the Renaissance that continues today.

Certainly, the humanities have evolved. Our standards of historical evidence and philosophical argument have grown much more rigorous, for example, and the classical focus has waned. However, even as the humanities have evolved, they have remained recognizably the same sort of thing. Though no longer the central part of humanistic education, the classics continue to engage us. Some fortunate remnant of every new generation inevitably rediscovers Plato, Aristotle, Homer, or Virgil and reinterprets those writers for contemporary needs. Students still study Greek and Latin and gain something by that study. Even though the classics no longer remain central to humanistic study, the topics and techniques are remarkably the same. Humanists write treatises and essays explicating, interpreting, or arguing with other treatises and essays about topics of human interest. They write literary criticism. They edit and translate new editions. They learn foreign languages to enjoy foreign literature or read the work of foreign scholars. They depend on libraries to supply the books and essays they need for their work, and now they can easily acquire almost anything they need rather than scour old monasteries and attics for undiscovered treasures.

Several blogs I follow talk about the need to innovate, or they’ll say, “for those interested in innovation” or something like that, or perhaps they’ll link to that inflated list of 100 bad excuses not to innovate. Since I’m not worried about being considered a luddite or a technophobe or hostile to change (which it should be clear I’m not), I will say I’m not the least interested in innovation. Mere change means nothing to me. Innovation as an end in itself seems to be what some people mean when they embrace the concept, and this seems to me oriented too much toward commercial culture and the constant need to tempt the masses with shiny new objects so they will spend, spend, spend and drive our consumer economy. Such a focus is at odds with the goal of humanistic study, and one could argue also at odds with the attitude appropriate for free human beings. Humanistic study, and to some extent the entire mission of the university and the university library, has a constancy of method that has hardly changed at all, especially since the rise of the research university.

In the humanities, we do have shiny new ideas, but the are embodied in the same old textual discourse of the past 500 years. I’m interested in acquiring appropriate collections and making sure scholars can find and use them. Any innovation that helps in that mission is a good thing. Any other innovation is irrelevant to my needs. But in the humanities, the technological innovations tend to be obvious electronic replacements for traditional tools. Now we have ebooks, ejournals, email, all just e-versions of things we have had for centuries. We have even, if you believe such things, survived the paradigm shift from modern to postmodern thought with no radical changes in the substance of communication, only the means. The rise of new communication technology has been an enormous boon to the humanities and we should all embrace it, but it has only served to aid very traditional methods. We’ve exchanged print for online, broadsides for blogs, but we haven’t exchanged language for grunts (if you except the output of some French poststructuralists).

A lot of the innovation obsession concerns processes. Are we doing things as well as we could be doing them? I have no problem with this. As much as anyone I dislike the we’ve-always-dunit-this-way attitude. I want to know the reason you’ve always done it that way, which isn’t always easy to articulate (probably another blog post there). Regardless, I find senseless resistance to change as foolish as obsession with constant and radical change. If you want constant or radical change, I also want a reason, and the reason can’t be “because we’ve never done it this way.” What’s missing from many discussions are the reasons for innovation.

Not always, however. Sometimes the reason given is that people are changing. There’s a lot of talk of the changing tastes and needs of younger library users, much no doubt accurate. However, it’s not always our mission to adapt ourselves to new users as to adapt new scholars in the humanities to the 500-year-old tradition of humanistic scholarship. We should definitely make it as easy as possible for all scholars, the new and the old, to be able to find and retrieve their necessary books and essays as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in this respect we should innovate as necessary. But we should always keep in mind our mission. In the humanities, the mission isn’t to assume that students don’t read, for example, and adapt to their needs. They have to read, a lot, and well. There’s no other choice in humanistic scholarship.

The humanities are about reading and thinking through language and texts. We can’t assume that they inhabit a “visual culture” and there’s an end on it. There’s almost no visual culture in the humanities outside of art or film criticism. Humanistic scholars read, write, discuss, argue. They don’t make collages or Youtube videos, at least not as a central part of their scholarship. They might record a lecture, but that’s usually much more boring than reading an essay. I don’t know why we sometimes assume that the newest generation is somehow too slow or shallow to be able to adapt themselves to this scholarly tradition. They play video games, and they read books. They make videos, and they write essays. The liberal arts, the studies proper to free and rational human beings, are alive and well. That they aren’t the stuff of reality TV or celebrity websites means nothing, because they have always been the domain of the relative few who seek to question or reflect upon the world around them. Higher education in America gives us the opportunity to expand the benefits of the humanities, not assume that such study is irrelevant to the desires of today’s youth while we desperately flail around trying to seem relevant.

For better or worse, we have to acknowledge that the humanities have in many ways hardly changed for half a millennium and that they aren’t changing now. I rarely work outside the humanities, so I won’t try to extend this argument further afield, though I think it also probably applies to many areas of the social sciences. I’m just putting forth one reason why I don’t feel the urgency or anxiety about innovation or change that many other librarians seem to. I feel comfortable using any new technology or adopting any new service model that comes along as long as I also feel confident that such change serves the living tradition of scholarship in the humanities.

But What If I Don’t Want it All?

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Steven Bell has a typically thought-provoking blog post at the ACRLog entitled Sorry But You Can’t Have it All. I don’t really know Steven, but since we did meet once years ago I’ll be informal and call him Steven. Before I begin discussing this post, I want to note two things for the record. First, I often disagree with either the substance or the tone of Steven’s blog posts, though not necessarily this time. Second, in terms of raising and framing issues of interest to academic librarians, discussing them intelligently, and provoking response, I think he is one of the best library writers around right now. He riles me up in a good way, and I’m thankful for it. Though I rarely do it, when I read one of his posts I often want to write one of my own in response, if only to argue the point. This time I am responding, but unfortunately to something within the post rather than the argument of the post itself.

In the post, he discusses a talk he gave to a group of library directors called “The Search for Tomorrow’s Library Leaders in A ‘Dissin’ the Director’ Landscape,” as well as some of their responses to his arguments. He points out that many Gen-X and Gen-Y librarians are critical of library directors and unwilling to sacrifice their personal lives to achieve a library directorship. These cohorts want a better work-life balance than library directors appear to have. He also argues that part of the problem is that they don’t see the potential rewards, and that the current generation of library directors should do a better job of communicating with the younger librarians, teaching them about leadership, setting good examples of leadership, and cultivating the next generation of library directors. And the goal isn’t to get just any library directors, but to attract the best and the brightest to the directorship.

And notice I’m saying “directors,” though he often uses the term “leaders.” I’ve written before about my disagreement with Steven’s conflation of the terms library leader, director, administrator, etc. The person in charge isn’t necessarily a leader, and to conflate the terms unnecessarily both aggrandizes the incompetent directors and leaves us without a way to praise those directors who are great leaders as well as acknowledge those librarians who are in fact leaders and not directors. For some reason, he doesn’t want these terms parsed, but that’s neither here nor there.

I don’t necessarily disagree with him in this post, and indeed think he makes a compelling argument, though I was struck by some of the comments to his speech, in particular this one: “One director said this was all well and good but that the current generation of directors needed to give their nextgen colleagues a dose of reality. Getting the job done, said the director, requires certain personal sacrifices, and that a work-life imbalance, staying late, working weekends, getting emergency calls in the middle of the night, is occasionally necessary. Bottom line: you can’t have it all.” This comment seems to have inspired the title of Steven’s post, but it inspired me with irritation. Thus, I’m responding more to this comment than to the general argument of the post. I am hardly a voice for my generation (that would be Gen-X), but at the same time I’m not necessarily responding with personal arguments. I’m just putting forth some plausible reasons why bright people might not want to be library directors based on librarians of all ages I know.

Since I dislike these generational and “class” wars, I want to state my opinion of library directors up front. I’m not in the camp of “dissin’ the director,” and in fact just cringed when writing the word “dissin’,” though perhaps that’s more because of my concern for the English language than any concern for directors. I’ve gotten along just fine with every library director I’ve worked for, even when I disagreed with them. If we extend this to library managers in general, the same applies. Early in my career I did have a horrendous experience with a library (mis)manager, but instead of developing a suspicion of management in general, I instead took my issues straight to the library director, whom I liked very much and with whom I got on quite well. And I suppose it’s just barely possible I’ll be a library director someday myself, and I wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite.

Back to the comment. I was particularly irritated by the notion that library directors need to give us mere librarians a “dose of reality.” The arrogance of that statement took me aback. We Gen-X and -Y librarians work in libraries. We know what reality is, thank you very much. Personal sacrifices, work-life imbalance, staying late, working weekends: many of us do that without either the title or salary of “director,” and to imply otherwise itself shows a disconnect from reality. The generational difference, if indeed there is one, is that perhaps the younger generation doesn’t see this sort of sacrifice as a badge of honor so much as a road to unhappiness and burnout.

This tough talk reminds me of people who brag about how hard they work and how little sleep they get, as if I’m supposed to be impressed by them ruining their health and running themselves into the ground for what is most likely an enterprise of dubious value. That these sacrifices are “sometimes” necessary is one thing. It seems that the larger issue is that lots of younger librarians see these sacrifices as always necessary for library management, and they’re not willing to make the sacrifices. Perhaps they have more fulfilling personal lives than this particular library director. Perhaps they have a young child, as I do. Perhaps they have hobbies or interests that transcend their jobs.

And then the inevitable platitude: you can’t have it all. But what if you don’t want it all? Isn’t that exactly what the younger librarians “dissin’ the director” have said? They don’t want it all, and now they’re being criticized for not being able to have something that they never wanted in the first place. Steven’s concern is to show the best and the brightest of these younger librarians the benefits of directorship, and not just the burdens. I don’t know if I would be included in his “best and brightest” category of librarians, though I’m no slouch, but I would like to posit some reasons why librarians might not want to become library directors that haven’t anything to do with “dissin'” anyone.

For example, a lot of academic librarians identify as much or more with the “academic” as with the “librarian.” For whatever reason, they’re more interested in being a librarian for a particular field than in just being a librarian or they identify more with the professors than the library administrators, and some of them have a horror of ever being identified as a “manager.” Management is what those commercial folk do. Being engaged in the teaching and learning of a university is enjoyable. Spending time reading widely and trying to understand a particular field or the entire world compels many librarians. A lot of librarians have wide-ranging intellectual interests that have little to do with librarianship, though they might need libraries to fulfill their intellectual needs. They might be interested in literature or history or politics or even books, but not in management, and they’re not interested in the hassles they see library managers burdened with. They’ve had a “dose of reality,” and they know they’d rather work with scholars and build collections and follow their interests than deal with these burdens.

Take, for example, the necessity to deal with people’s personal problems, which managers and directors sometimes have to do. They probably don’t like it, either, but it comes with the job. While making exceptions for emergencies of various kinds, some librarians think people should keep their personal problems and their work separate. Being professional means we do our jobs, and being decent human beings means we take into consideration external problems and opportunities that happen to us all but interfere with work and make allowances for them. But then there are the petty squabbles, the gossipy scandal-mongers, the perennial layabouts, the needy, the whiners and the pouters, the offensive and the offended that sometimes in some places take up inordinate amounts of time for some managers.

One might respond that directors usually have their middle managers to deal with this stuff. Well, that’s another issue. Even some librarians who might be interested in being library directors have no interest in spending ten to twenty years working through middle-management positions to get there. They might be brilliant visionaries, and don’t want to spend years making sure a service point gets staffed or the student workers show up or writing gobs of performance reviews. They don’t want years of being pressured from above and below. Having a vision and trying to make that vision a reality? That’s one thing. But decades of middle management might crush their vision and their spirit. One might respond that this trip through what some librarians consider the purgatory of middle management is necessary for seasoning a director. After all, people have to “pay their dues” (which goes along nicely with the banal cliché about a “dose of reality”). But the point is that a lot of librarians–smart, talented, capable, even passionate librarians–believe, rightly or wrongly, that these dues are just too high. The opportunity costs are disproportionate to the rewards.

There could be many other reasons why talented librarians aren’t very interested in being directors, and some of them might indeed have to do with a certain hostility to library administrators in general. The venom that some librarians have toward the powers that be can be potent stuff. These librarians seem to believe that stepping over the line into administration is like stepping over to the dark side, that the goal of all library administrators is to manipulate their underlings and destroy the library. It seems to me the people who think this way may have been the victims of especially incompetent directors, of managers who don’t know how to manage and may have been promoted by default, as was my horrendous (mis)manager. If this is the case, then Steven’s overall goal is even more compelling, because the way to prevent default administration by incompetents is to persuade the talented to step up and wrestle for control.

But for other librarians, the problem could just be they think being a library director carries too many burdens and not enough benefits, and that the dues paid along the way are just too high. Can those librarians be persuaded to become library directors? I’m not sure. However, I am sure that those librarians aren’t going to be persuaded by some library director’s version of tough love. They’re not impressed by the tough, and they don’t want the love.

A Tale of Two Libraries

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I just got back from a four-day spree with an old friend in Chicago, and finally visited two major libraries there I’d been meaning to see for years. (Apologies to friends in Chicago I didn’t see; I was a bit rushed while there, what with all the eating, drinking, and museum visiting.) I’m not one of those librarians who has to see every library in every city I visit. I took a great library buildings class at Illinois, and after our tour of libraries I was library-buildinged out, so now I approach them sparingly. However, on Saturday I was on the UC campus to visit the Seminary Coop Bookstore and decided that it was silly not to stop by the Regenstein Library since I was close. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not that. Not being a huge fan of bludgeony modernist architecture, the outside put me off quite a bit before I stepped inside, but it certainly prepared me for the inside, which I also didn’t like. I saw only the reference room, but it didn’t make me want to go further. For some reason I found the waffled ceiling and the lighting oppressive. I probably missed the attractive spaces by not venturing further afield, but the entry didn’t pull me in at all.

Tagging along with another friend on a Monday mission, I found myself in the Harold Washington Library downtown. I’d also never been there, and all I can say is “wow.” The exterior is lovely, but the interior, especially the Winter Garden on the ninth floor, was outstanding. If only Firestone Library were that attractive. The Winter Garden might have been one of the most attractive library spaces I’ve ever been in. The light airiness of the interior drew me all the way to the ninth floor.

There’s really no point to this other than to report my own shock at how vastly different were two libraries in the same city. I expected the Harold Washington Library to be reasonably attractive, as main public libraries in major cities often are. Still, for some reason I expected the Regenstein Library to be impressive rather than just imposing, and I don’t know why.

This evaluation is no doubt entirely subjective, and I will allow for the fact that I saw very little of Regenstein, but the contrast was definitely an object lesson on how library buildings can be more or less inviting spaces. Public libraries want to be attractive because people don’t have to use them. Academic libraries often have captive audiences, but still it’s a nice surprise to go into one and be awed at the space.

No Demonstrations, Please

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As many public services librarians do, I give a lot of demonstrations, mostly to students, but sometimes to fellow librarians and even occasionally to the general public. I’ve been teaching a lot of instruction sessions the past month, all of which have demonstrations as part of their content. Last Saturday I presented a demonstration on Google tools to a community group at a NJ public library (which was great, especially since I didn’t know what to expect). Next week I’m giving workshops / demonstrations on Google tools and Internet searching beyond Google (does such exist anymore in the public mind?) to groups of public and school librarians. Then I’ll be giving a demo on some new resources to library staff here. I’m quite shy, which people who know me deny, but which causes me to be a little nervous when I speak in front of groups. Hundreds of hours teaching and presenting has done little to eliminate the queasy feeling I get in the ten minutes before beginning a class or presentation. Still, I’m a passable public speaker, and I don’t at all mind speaking in public for a good cause. Good causes include: it’s part of my job, sharing information with colleagues, and money. As I said, I don’t mind giving presentations and demonstrations, but I very much dislike being on the receiving end of one. I give demonstrations, it just puzzled me for a long time why anyone would go to one.

My problem is being wrapped up inside my own head (that sounds painful, doesn’t it?), and not thinking about the way other people learn. I know how I learn. I learn new things either by reading or doing. If it’s an intellectual subject, I’ll read a few books and articles. If it’s some sort of software or technical skill, I learn by just messing around with it until I’ve figured out how it works. I’ve even been known to combine these things and read the help pages if I can’t figure something out, and it puzzles me why so many people have an aversion to F1. This is why I don’t attend preconferences and avoid demonstrations about most things that I need to know about. Sometimes I attend demos as moral support, but I’m far more likely to go to a presentation about something of marginal use for me, just because I’m curious. For example, our economics librarian recently gave a fantastic two-part presentation on finance and finance resources. I don’t work with financial data and am highly unlikely ever to, but I found the talk interesting and informative. I learned a lot about something that I’ll probably never need to use, which incidentally characterizes most of my educational career.

However, when it comes to tools I might use, I would almost never go to a demo if I could avoid it. By the time someone gets around to giving a demonstration about something that might be of interest to me, it’s almost always the case that I’ve already read about it somewhere and if it seemed potentially useful played around with it already. Often, I feel that I could probably give the demonstration myself. And if it’s a demonstration of something like a new database, the demonstrator almost never covers what I want to cover at the pace I want to cover it.

Part of this is because I learn best on my own by doing, but I suspect part of it might have other motivations. Consider this old joke: a man staying in a boarding house sneaks a horse into the bathroom one night. The next morning the evidence is obvious: overturned furniture, hoof marks on the carpet and on the stairs, dents in the walls. The place is a mess. The landlord asked the man why he did it. The man says, “So the next morning when someone says, ‘There’s a horse in the bathroom!’ I could say, ‘Yes, I know.'” When some librarian says “You can do X with Y!” I like to be able to say, “Yes, I know.” Though I hardly think of myself as a faddist innovator desperately clinging to the bleeding edge, I also don’t want to be the person in the room saying I’ve never heard of some current subject or tool before. Also, for me it’s not enough just to have heard about it, I want to know more about it or how to use it, at least as a novice. I could just lie and say, “Yes, I know all about that,” but that would be dishonest. Plus, I might get questioned more and then have to resort to my standard technique for leaving awful meetings, which is to pretend I’m having a back spasm and leave the room never to return, which both gets me out of the awkward situation and gains me sympathy the next time I see people. (“How’s your back doing, you poor thing?”)

I’ve long since come to understand that other people want demonstrations because that’s how they learn best, by having someone speak to them and show them how things work. Still, I wonder if the people who learn best by watching demonstrations of, for example, new tools are the ones least likely to give such demonstrations themselves, and the people most likely to be giving the demonstrations are the least likely to have learned what they know by watching other demonstrations. This seems to be the case for some of the demonstrations I give, especially the ones off campus. This is the central irony that emerges whenever anyone asks, “but how did you learn about all this stuff?” Well, I just learned. There sometimes seems to be an assumption that such knowledge just comes naturally somehow, which is of course untrue. Perhaps the learning how to learn on my own comes naturally, which makes it different though not necessarily superior to learning from others. After all, people who attend demonstrations are there to learn something new. These days, it’s the people who don’t bother learning anything new at all who worry me.

Marks of Professionalism

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A couple of weeks ago an Annoyed Librarian post addressed the issue of whether an MLS was a requirement to call oneself a librarian. As is often the case, a long discussion ensued with much argument either way, and while I didn’t participate in the discussion, it did provoke my thoughts on the issue. I think I tend to agree with her position to some extent that the distinction is in the work done rather than the degree proper. However, even if we agree that the MLS is a necessary requirement to be considered a professional librarian, it’s not in my opinion a sufficient requirement. There’s a case to be made that more than an MLS and a job with the title of librarian is required to put the professional in “professional librarian.” What might this more be? Here are a handful of suggestions, but please suggest more (or critique my own suggestions).

First, I think it requires an engagement with the profession qua profession, rather than an exclusive concern with your own job and your own library. This engagement can take many forms, from writing or speaking to library audiences to attending conferences and participating in professional organizations to simply reading what others are writing or listening to what they are saying. This engagement should be active rather than passive, though, and involve seeking out opportunities rather than waiting for someone to summarize everything for you during a brief post-conference presentation. Librarians with absolutely no curiosity about larger issues in the profession or awareness even of trends that directly affect them are not acting very professionally.

Related to this would be keeping up with what’s going on in the broader library world, even if it doesn’t directly affect your job. This can only go so far, of course. For example, I follow some debates about institutional repositories or digitization of collections, but I don’t have enough mastery of the subjects to participate as meaningfully in the debates as those in the thick of the action. Still, even knowing a bit about a debate and that it exists is helpful both to understand references other librarians might make or to know where to go to increase my knowledge should the need ever arise. Knowing that librarians are doing things is sometimes as important as knowing how to do them.

These days one would need to add keeping up with technological trends as well, which doesn’t necessarily mean knowing how to tinker with the latest tools as knowing that the latest tools exist and how you might use them if you needed them. I, for example, have more or less given up trying to keep up with the latest trends in web design, though I used to be pretty competent and I can still create web pages that look okay. As I grew more specialized, it just became necessary that I depend on other specialists to do that work, while I consider perhaps how web design might be used to communicate more effectively with library patrons. As for the social software that is all the rage right now, I personally know quite a bit about it and I know what I like and don’t like, but I don’t think every librarian needs to write a blog or have a profile on Facebook, though they should know what all these things are and how they might be useful.

The key is knowing what’s going on and how it might relate to libraries. This requires considering a broad picture of the profession. How professional is a librarian who is completely unaware of professional trends or issues, or who has failed to keep up with even the most widespread trends? I recently was told about some reference librarians who through ignorance and lack of interest never used the Internet for anything except searching the online catalog, and one assumes that’s only because this library got rid of the card catalog. (I can’t imagine such a thing happening here; this was a very different library.) Considering the overwhelming impact of the Internet on contemporary communications and research, how can we consider such behavior at all professional? What’s more, this broad picture must consider professional issues to be broader than the profession itself. Trends in society and economics and communications technology are not library-specific issues, but awareness of them and some consideration of how they might affect libraries is important. For an academic librarian, we would have to add trends in academia as well.

The MLS may be necessary, but can’t be sufficient to be considered a professional librarian, because of necessity what one learns in library school becomes stale. Theoretical or ethical concerns may remain the same, but the practices and debates current in the profession inevitably affect what is taught at any given time, and these practices and debates evolve over time. Part of being a professional isn’t just stopping with what one learned in library school and then focusing exclusively on whatever job you happen to have, but continuing that learning and developing over time. In a sense, for the professional librarian, library school never ends (boy, that was painful to write), because the same behavior of discovery and awareness that should have been part of the library school experience has to remain. Professionalism requires seeing ourselves in our library but also in The Library, and seeing The Library in the world.

Not Much of a Blogger

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I don’t think I’m doing this blogging thing right. First of all, I’m in no danger of dying from blogging, which is what sort of happened to a couple of prominent bloggers I’ve never heard of. No anxiety or lost sleep if I don’t post. Also, I don’t have anything to sell you or a cause for you to join. I don’t have a mission to preach or an agenda for change. I know that there are some readers out there and I hope you’re occasionally pleased, but except for my journal this is probably the space where I pay the least attention to audience in the sense of trying to attract readers or please editors. The audience I think most about here is me, and the kind of library writing I’d like to read. And I sure don’t make any money from it. In fact, since the blog is hosted on the university blog service, I don’t think I’m even allowed to make money with it. I don’t even promote myself as a potential consultant or speaker or anything.

So just from that I figure I’m not much of a blogger, and then I ran across some blog post with 10 questions every blogger should ask, and I hardly ask any of them.

For example, there’s question #1: “How quickly can my readers understand what my post is about?”

Probably not very quickly, and I’m assuming this isn’t a good thing. Sometimes I finish writing a post, and I’m not quite sure what my post is about. “Libraries” is about the best I can do, except when it’s not.

“2. Does my blog offer something novel or unexpected?”

That’s a tough one. I guess it depends on what you expect. If you expect something concise and topical like Library Stuff, then no. Nothing on the blog seems novel to me, so it’s hard to answer. This is just stuff I think about.

“3. How helpful is my content?”

What am I supposed to help you do? Reflect? Sometimes I might help with that, I guess. Certainly nothing practical. That’s always been my problem as a library writer. Definitely not practical enough for a very practical profession.

“4. Why should my readers trust me?”

I guess “because I say so” doesn’t work well as an answer. Because I can write coherent paragraphs? Because I work in a library? Do I care if you trust me? After all, I’m not trying to sell you insurance or anything.

“5. Does my content speak to people on a human level?”

Something tells me the answer to this question is “no,” especially since the writer interprets “human” as “emotional.” I think if you read all the posts, you’d get some idea of my personality, but I don’t push it, probably because I don’t have much of a personality. Sometimes I talk about myself, but usually not, and rarely about my emotions. If I start going on about my emotions, you’ll know the breakdown is eminent.

“6. Is my post easy to read and scroll through?”

Well, the writing’s pretty clear, if that’s what you mean, at least I think it is. It’s grammatical, and that’s something these days. I don’t know about being easy to scroll through. That probably depends more on your browser than my blog.

“7. Does my content cover what needs to be discussed or answered?”

Probably not, because hardly anything I write about really needs to be discussed or answered.

“8. Am I revealing enough information about my topic?”

I probably reveal too much information about my topic.

“9. Am I fulfilling my readers’ expectations?”

I’m not sure if my readers, such that they are, even have expectations, so I don’t know. This is bad, isn’t it.

“10. Am I reaching out for support?”

Not really, but I’ve always been something of a loner. The exposition continues, “Writing content with their interests in mind, as well as the interests of your readers, can help boost your blogging authority if said experts find your articles useful.” I doubt I have much of a blogging authority, though I suppose I’m sort of an authority about something library-related, but probably not any more so than most of my readers, who are, after all, librarians.

“You should always have an active interest in the social networking community and be willing to express it in your posts – either by explicitly mentioning other blogging/bookmarking talents or by editing your content so that it is more bookmark friendly.” I don’t do much of that, either, do I, and I’m not sure I could because I cringe when “talent” is used as a noun to describe a person. I always think of the line from Groundhog Day: “Did he just call himself ‘the talent’?” I don’t even link out to other blogs very often, even though I follow a lot of them. It’s nothing personal. I’m just not seeking “link love” or whatever it’s called.

I definitely don’t have an active interest in the social networking community. I ran across the blog post above via Walt at Random and the AL Direct, which apparently thought it worth reading for library bloggers. That’s about the best I can do to link out to the “blogging talent.”

Also, I don’t even understand the “bookmark friendly” advice, so I know I’m not doing it right. I use Google bookmarks, and I can bookmark anything on the web, which doesn’t require any special skills as far as I can tell. Is there something besides having each post as a separate url that makes it any easier to bookmark? I don’t know, and the sad thing for my professional blogging career is that I don’t really care.

The Age of Librarians

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For some reason I can’t fathom, a lot of librarians seem to resent or resist the young, and by young I mean anyone under 50. Recently I heard of a criticism of a candidate for a high level library job at another university. The criticism? She’s 35. That was it. So a person is old enough to be the President of the United States, but much too young to be the head of a library department. The thing is, I’ve heard or read this sort of thing often. There’s a lot of concern about the future of library leadership these days. Steven Bell blogs frequently about it at ACRLog, the ALA has talked of a crisis of library leadership, and Walt Crawford is working on the Palinet Leadership Network. It’s just possible that part of the crisis is a resistance to talent not accompanied by decades of experience. In my experience, those two things are not necessarily related.

It’s true that the absolute worst supervisor I ever saw was relatively young (30 at the time). She destroyed a good library department by driving off all the librarians. However, her incompetence stemmed from her stupidity, ignorance, and malignancy, not her age. I think we can all agree that stupidity, ignorance, and malignancy are hardly confined to the young. On the other hand, we can also probably think of plenty of examples of experienced librarians over fifty, including some in leadership positions, who are just terrible. My point is not to promote the young or deride the old, but merely to show that talent and age/experience aren’t necessarily connected.

The few times I’ve been considered youngish in libraries have seemed odd to me, since I didn’t even become a librarian until I was 30. I was 32 when I started this job, and one day a few months into the job someone (good naturedly and somewhat in jest) said I was just a baby, presumably in comparison to most of my colleagues. Since this was purely an age comment, and not a response to any ongoing mewling or puking, I didn’t think it was meant condescendingly, so I let it pass, but I still thought it bizarre. I’ve been driving legally and working part or full time since the day I turned 15. By 32, I’d worked as a cook, bartender, maintenance worker, landscaper, teacher, bookstore manager, library clerk, and professional librarian. I had a wife of eight years, a child of two, a few college degrees, and my second professional librarian job. I’d live in six different states in three different regions of the country. And both my parents were dead, so there was no running home to the folks. I’m not sure when one becomes an adult in this society, since the period of childhood seems always in flux, but I can say there’s a point after which calling someone a baby is naive and insulting, as if age itself were indicative of ability and experience relevant to librarianship only if the experience is performing the same job in a library for 25 years.

Perhaps it’s the academic environment. Academia in general is obsessed with credentials, expecting PhDs for jobs that have little need for one. Arguments about one of the regrettable trends in academia–the permanent adjunct without tenure–often brings this obsession to light in an odd way. One of the occasional complaints is that universities hire people to teach first year writing classes without (gasp!) PhDs. The lament about the lack of job security and academic freedom for professors is compelling, but I don’t see why anyone would need a PhD to teach freshman writing. The rise of the necessity of the PhD for (especially lower level) undergraduate teaching, rather than scholarly research, seems one of the odder academic narratives of the twentieth century. Likewise I wonder about college libraries that require their director to have a PhD. Sure, it might be nice, but a requirement? In the days when library directors were scholars first and library directors second, it was a natural outcome of the process, but that era ended decades ago, and now I’m sure we all know of plenty, perhaps even a majority, of successful directors of even large research libraries without a PhD.

I’m not sure why age and credentials are treated with such awe, because they’re certainly not in other parts of society. As with so many other oddities, it might have something to do with the lack of a profit motive. Businesses usually want to make a profit, so they’re interested in what workers can do rather than in their degrees or age. I only know two working adults around my age who didn’t go to college, and both of them are successful in business and make a lot more money than I do (one of them did recently go back to college part time and complete a degree, but he was already making a lot more than me before he went back). They’re happy and adjusted and very smart and talented, and both of them were making their marks before age thirty and without college degrees. Librarianship makes this sort of success story very difficult, even if one has a library degree.

I hesitated to address this topic, for all sorts of reasons. For one, I’ve seen discussions of topics like this degenerate into a rant fest dividing along generational lines where younger librarians rant about those dried up baby-boomers and how they should retire already and let things change and give the young folks a chance, and the older librarians either condescending to the younger ones or more naturally wondering, what the heck did I ever do to deserve this sort of criticism? Since when is getting old a crime? Such generational generalizing is a waste of time. There are good and bad librarians of every age. That great librarian nearing retirement was probably a great librarian (at least in potentio) at age 25, and that dull-witted and incompetent 25-year-old librarian will most likely still be dull-witted and incompetent at 60. I’ve always noticed librarians both younger and older who impressed the hell out of me, and also ones that have made me wonder how they ever even made it through library school, and that’s saying something.

The biggest reason I almost didn’t write is the possibility that this post will seem like sour grapes, so I want to address this at length. After all, while I don’t feel young, at 38 I’m probably viewed that way by a lot of librarians. There are probably relatively few librarians out there more than 10 years younger than I am, but there’s a huge cohort about 20 years older. Am I one of the “young” upstarts who wants to move up “fast”? I will admit there was a time early in my career when “library director” seemed like a worthy goal, but now, to be honest, I’m not so sure. Partly it’s because I actually like my work, and I’m pretty good at it, and it gives me the opportunity to do other things I like, such as writing and teaching. Despite my “youth,” it took me a very long time to find a place in the working world that I felt comfortable with, and that allowed me to contribute whatever talents I have to the institution while still rewarding me adequately and allowing me sufficient autonomy and control over my work. It has been clear since my JROTC class in the ninth grade that I don’t react well to excessive regimentation and hierarchy. Nobody likes being ordered around, I suppose, but I really don’t like it, and I worked hard to find a position that gave me the autonomy, freedom, and support to do my job as I thought it should be done, and rewarded intelligence, initiative, experimentation, creativity, and results rather than rule-following and clock-punching and brown-nosing. Plus I have tenure! (Or tenure lite, at least.) Moving to any administrative job would take me away from a lot of what I like about my work while burdening me with a lot of things I don’t think I would like.

At the moment at least, and this could always change, I can’t imagine why I would leave the perfect library job, as imperfect as it can be sometimes, for much else. I have a great library job with good pay and benefits, and the temptation to move up one step to, for example, head of reference probably wouldn’t make sense for me just for financial reasons. There are also personal reasons. The fact that my wife has a great job that she likes a lot makes relocating difficult as well. Both spouses in a professional couple having great jobs they like is a rare enough situation to preserve, especially with the relatively paltry financial incentives librarians usually have for moving just one step up the ladder. (It’s not like we’re talking doubling salaries with big signing bonuses or anything.)

There are also professional concerns. For example, for various reasons I don’t want to mention I don’t want to work at a tenure-track library where the librarians have faculty status (at least coming in without tenure), and it’s not because I can’t write or publish. (I can write and publish, I just choose not to. So there.) Unfortunately, this leaves out some libraries I’d like to work at and places I’d like to live, including my grad school and library school alma mater UIUC–which I have a great affection for and still miss sometimes–and many other great state university libraries. On the other hand, state universities are more dependent on annual legislative budgets than I think is good for library collections and services. (In the debate over increasing tuition and how much private universities spend of their endowments, I’m troubled that the driving force seems to be resentment against elite universities rather than resentment that states don’t make their public colleges and universities a top priority.) Good research libraries require a steady supply of money, and can’t be left to the whimsy of politicians.

There may come a day when I want to move up or move on, and I’m occasionally tempted by an especially attractive job ad and even occasionally apply, but I’ve reached the pleasurable professional position where for the foreseeable future even the attractive libraries would probably have to actively recruit me for anything higher up, and in all honesty I don’t know why any of them would. I certainly have various strengths and talents and I try to do a good job, but I hardly think that people look at me and say, “now THAT’S library leadership material! Let’s make THAT guy our AUL!” And this despite my height and good hair. After all that disclosure, it should be clear that I’m not exactly chomping at the bit for any so-called advancement, though if the opportunity were right I wouldn’t refuse it.

So why do I even bring this up? As if often the case with my writing here, it’s because of something I think I notice but don’t understand. Is it the case that a lot of librarians are resistant to giving leadership positions to librarians that can be considered young only in relation to a relatively aged cohort? If so, is this just the natural state of humankind, or is there something about libraries that makes this so? Could this be part of the so-called crisis of library leadership? There are plenty of librarians, but do the powers that be think their youth and lack of similar library experience mean they can’t do a good job? Or could it be that librarians in general are risk averse, especially when it comes to something like this?

I want to reiterate that I’m not criticizing older generations of librarians or calling for some sort of revolution. As should be clear to those who read the blog, I like young people, especially our college students. I never make any attempt to seem cool or young or hip, but I like students and generally get along well with them, mostly because I treat them as the intelligent adults they usually are rather than trying to be one of them. However, I don’t worship youth, and I see it as part of the my job as a teacher and librarian to help acculturate the students, to bring them into the tradition of the best that has been thought and said to prepare them for the struggle to make the world as good as it can be. I also don’t resent the past or those older than me. I find the “This is the way we’ve always done it” argument ludicrous, but because it’s stupid, not because someone a generation older than me said it. The traditions we pass on need to be justified, certainly. Just because we’ve done things this way means nothing, as if it were some sort of crime that we should know more about something than our ancestors.

However, I also resist the temptation to eliminate that which has gone before merely because it’s old. Libraries and librarians have done great things in the past and have built up the sometimes magnificent libraries some of us enjoy working in today, and it does seem to me that younger librarians (and sometimes even older librarians) are sometimes willing to abandon traditions without understanding what they do. Institutions that have grown over decades or centuries have developed to serve various needs, and it can be the case that we don’t understand what need some practice served until we have eliminated the practice. Scholars today benefit enormously from the practices and decisions of librarians of the past, and those librarians of the past didn’t even know how to make a wiki, the poor things. You wouldn’t know it to talk to me, but I’m from the south, and one of my favorite quotes is from Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (Quoted recently, you might remember, by a remarkable and youngish politician challenging the presumption that age and specific experience is more important than talent and ability.) If you’re a fellow southerner, you probably feel the resonance of that line, but though I haven’t lived in the south for sixteen years, I feel the same way every time I stand in the stacks of a research library.

So I’m not saying, hey, old people, move out of the way because the young ‘uns know everything and are better than you. I am, however, saying that I have noticed on many occasions that younger librarians are resented or resisted merely because of their age, and I consider this as serious a loss for libraries as the disappearance of a useful and valuable tradition merely because it’s misunderstood.

(P.S. I think I let this blog post get away from me, which segues well into my next blog post where I discuss why I don’t think I do this blogging thing very well.)

Limits to Instruction

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I’m in the midst of the library instruction silly season, and because we’re slightly short-handed I’m teaching more sessions than I usually do. When I was in library school and tried to explain to non-library grad students what I was training to do, I used to say that reference was something like research without the writing and teaching without the grading. Later it became increasingly clear that it was also teaching without developing longer relationships with students or engaging in intellectual discussion about topics of mutual interest, but that’s neither here nor there. Of course, library instruction is more like training than teaching in ordinary academic senses. As time passes and I learn more, I’m also increasingly aware that the initial training must of necessity cover less ground, only because the ground to cover has grown so much.

Let me explain a bit. The sessions I typically do this time of year are for freshmen in the writing program. The Princeton Writing Program is a great model for such a program. The classes are all focused around an academic topic and students can choose their topic for the most part, the class size is limited to twelve students, and every class is assigned a librarian usually conversant with the general area of the topic (so humanities librarians do humanities topics, science librarians science topics, etc.). When I teach a writing seminar, I’m my own librarian, but I also act as the librarian for several other writing seminars.

The problem comes with the variety of topics and approaches. If there were, for example, a purely literary seminar, the instruction is somewhat easy. Search the catalog, search MLA, read your text closely. The typical instruction session lends itself easily to that general format: finding books and articles. But as we all know that’s just the beginning, and not necessarily even an appropriate beginning for some areas. For historical topics, it might be best to start with an archive somewhere and work outwards from that, but these students typically don’t have that opportunity. Because of the compressed timeline of their projects, they also typically wouldn’t have the time, for example, to page through year after year of print indexes of old newspapers, which they might then have to acquire on microfilm through ILL, especially if this is only a portion of their research. Our effort here is to prepare them for their junior and senior years, when most of the students will be doing sustained independent work for junior papers and senior theses. In these seminars we can only show them bits and pieces.

Another challenge is the multidisciplinary nature of many of the seminars, at least the ones I tend to get. There’s no one model of library research that will benefit everyone. In some of the classes, one person will be working on 17th century English political history while another will be working on contemporary media treatments of terrorist acts (this happened in a session last night). Great beginnings, perhaps, but in one session it’s tough to cover enough general information to start working on both of these topics, so all I can do is show a few tips and techniques and try to provide some general theorizing on how to proceed. After that, I try to work on a student by student basis. I can show everyone how to search WorldCat and Proquest, but with several hundred databases to choose from, showing new students how to begin navigating just our online resources is tricky, not to mention various print sources and archives and free online sources.

The most frequent request I get when working with these students is for books or articles already doing what they propose to do. “Can you help me find articles on how email is a form of civic friendship?” is one of my favorites from a couple of years ago. To which I can only answer, well, no, because there are no such articles (at least there weren’t then). We have to get the students to understand that it’s their job to bring together a variety of theories and facts and interpretations into a coherent argument.

If we add in the further challenge of trying to get the students to get out of the reporting mindset, the obstacles grow even more. There’s the “I need five articles to support X topic.” I don’t get this as much here as I did in previous libraries, but there is still sometimes the belief that you can choose a topic, find the required number of sources quickly, read them, then write an essay, rather than reading a lot before they can even begin to think about a thesis. Instead, we have to argue and sometimes demonstrate that scholarship rarely happens in a vacuum. Scholars have conversations with each other, sometimes over centuries or even millennia. In the humanities, these conversations take place in texts; books respond to books, articles to articles, but always one scholar responding to one or more other scholars discussing a problem. So we have to get the students looking for these conversations and finding a place to insert themselves, to know that they need to find a clearing in the forest of scholarship to build their own shanty of argument. (I think I’ll use that metaphor with the students just to sound obscurantist.)

Another way to think of this problem is through the rhetorical concept of kairos. Kairos is the rhetorical situation, the proper moment to speak or write. Part of kairos is the exigence, the crisis that calls forth rhetoric. How can we show students how to use library research and engagement with sources to find their own kairos? What crisis do they discover that calls forth their rhetoric? What clearing in the conversation can allow them to emerge? And how can library research help that?

And finally, how can all this be started effectively within an hour?