I attended the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver this week, and got back late Wednesday night. In case anyone is ever thinking of flying with me, don’t. It’s pretty much a guarantee that your bags will get lost, or the flight will be horribly delayed, or there’ll be bad storms, or they won’t have any food you can eat (even for sale), or the plane will develop engine trouble just after takeoff and will have to fly in circles for two hours to burn off enough fuel to land again back at the same airport. It’s no wonder I don’t like to travel anywhere if it means flying. When it comes to flying, I seem to have some bad hoodoo.

However, the Reference Renaissance conference was pretty good. I went to a few informative sessions, learned a bit I didn’t know before, met some nice folks. I’m something of an introvert, and typically don’t feel comfortable around people I don’t know, but I got invited to a lunch with several librarians I didn’t know and enjoyed myself. The only drawback to the conference was that the hotel was about 10 miles from downtown, but I did make it in one night for some excellent seafood (I know, in Denver of all places) and at a martini bar had a drink called a Dean Martini, served in an ashtray with a candy cigarette. I know what you’re thinking. Classy!

I gave a presentation I’m tentatively calling “The Iron Cage of Google,” which isn’t the title on the program. The problem was that I didn’t know specifically what I was going to talk about until the week before I left. Titles are arbitrary, anyway. The presentation seemed to go well. I planned it as infotainment, and I think some people learned about at least a couple of things they didn’t know about, plus the laughs came in all the right places. My Second Life joke went over particularly well, so I’m going to have to try to work that one into another presentation sometime. The room was full, but I suspect the audience came to see the practical stuff after me. I’m never sure why anyone comes to any of my presentations. They just seem so obvious. I wouldn’t go. I already know all that stuff.

One of the best things logistically about the conference was the strict time-keeping. I’d had a discussion with the chief planner after I was accepted to speak about time-keeping. (I know her, so I didn’t feel bad about being blunt.) We discussed how annoying it is to have people go over time and then leave other people without enough. I’ve been burned by that before. So she made me the chair of my own panel, as well as another one, plus made cards reading 5, 2, and 0, to be flashed by the chair when the speaker had 5 minutes left, etc. When the 0 card was flashed, the speaker had one sentence to conclude, and then had to stop. All the presentations I saw were timed well, and I didn’t have to use my 0 card at all when I was chairing.

All in all, it was a very practical conference with a lot of engaged speakers. I hope they put it on again next year, preferably somewhere I can travel by train.

I wanted to write this yesterday, when the death itself occurred, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The grief was too strong. I arrived at work to an email from a friend, with the simple subject line “AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH.” At first, there was the denial. This can’t really be happening. I couldn’t believe it, despite the evidence. I tried and tried, but the death reports were true. Then came the anger. Anger! And I knew I wasn’t alone. Many of us were angry. Then, of course, the bargaining. Just one more day, please, pretty please, just let me make it through the week! The depression quickly followed. That’s why I couldn’t write about this yesterday. I couldn’t see the screen through the tears. Finally, the acceptance. I wasn’t at peace with the world, but I finally realized there was nothing I could do, and just had to accept it. So I gave up on Scrabulous and added the Scrabble Beta application to Facebook.

It doesn’t work well. In fact, it doesn’t even work. It teased me by letting me start a game, but then went down. I suspect Hasbro created this dysfunctional app so they could argue that Scrabulous was competing with them on Facebook. So they put up this flashy junk that doesn’t work. As of this writing, they have an error message. They’ll be up again, someday! They claim they’re working on streamlining their crappy app for their “official release” in mid-August. Sure.

The most painful part of the message is the final part: “Please continue to let us know how we can make Scrabble – the best word game on Facebook – even better!

– The Scrabble Team”

What suggestions could we have, when we know that Scrabulous was the best word game on Facebook? Are we really to trust the “Scrabble Team,” the team that helped destroy the object of our affection that helped give us pleasure during so many lonely hours? I don’t think so.

But there’s nothing I can do about that, either. I must learn acceptance. I won’t get to finish those games I was playing, the only consolation being that I was losing two of them. My best bingo (SPeLLING for 158 points) will no longer be on record. That’s just the way it is, I guess. Sometimes the good die young.

Goodbye, old friend.

Like many of you, I’ve been reading about Cuil, the new search engine from some former Google employees. I tried a couple of searches, but so far I don’t see why I would use this much. I searched “academic librarian,” for example. Of the eleven hits on the first page, four were to this blog. It’s nice to know I have such “authority,” but I thought four was about three too many. Three of the four hits had pictures of people beside them. I have no idea who the people are, but they’re definitely not me. I also searched “bivens-tatum.” The hits are all relevant, and there’s a nice spread, but again the pictures have nothing to do with me. There’s a picture of some painting by the link to this blog, but this blog doesn’t have any images. Perhaps the image comes from somewhere on the Princeton server. If the top left hit is the most relevant, then apparently a Shakespeare authorship website I made in library school is the most relevant web page related to me. Maybe they know it’s the first web page I ever created, so it has a certain sentimental value.

The layout is presumably to prevent the need to scroll, but I would like an option in the preferences to have more hits on the first page. When I’m looking for information, I want more text, rather than a tastefully arranged page with images scattered across like knick-knacks. I might like the search results better if I wasn’t ego-cuiling, but I don’t think I’d like the layout.

Anyway, there’s my two cents.

In the humanities, we shouldn’t have to write budget reports. The library should just give us money to spend.

If our salaries were related to our budgets, those science librarians would make a ton of money. Instead of being related to something rational, like height, our salaries seem to be related to some sort of market.

If Europeans want us to buy more books, they really should do something about that euro. That thing has gone up 78% against the dollar since I started this job. One begins to think, hmm, if there’s any philosophy in French or German worth getting, it’d probably be translated and published in America. Right?

Not that I’m much of a one for nostalgia anyway, but I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to be a librarian before Excel.

Procrastination: Complete.

You may not be aware of this, but you’ve been reading an experiment. It might not have felt like an experiment, but it was. A year ago this week I started writing this blog as an experiment. A year in I’m trying to figure out just what I think I’ve been doing.

I’d been reading a number of library blogs for a couple of years, and had considered one of my own, but I wasn’t sure what I would write about or whether I could sustain it. Though I work in a library, and read and think about libraries, I never wrote much about libraries or librarianship until I started this blog, so I wasn’t sure I’d have much to say. Writing itself wasn’t a problem, because I write every day and find writing itself to be therapeutic, but writing just about libraries seemed like it might be tough. My goal was to write a solid, readable library blog that discussed issues in academic librarianship and higher education more generally. Up to a point, I think I’ve succeeded. Even if I haven’t, this somewhat atypical library blog seems to have about 300 regular readers and a bit more occasional readers after a year. That probably doesn’t sound like much, but it pleased me, and I thank you all for reading.

Before I began, I asked some other bloggers for advice. One told me he thought there might be a niche for a library blogger who wrote about the sort of issues I write about. Another blogger who chooses to remain anonymous said to go for quality over quantity of posts, not to be afraid of the long post, and to choose a blog title early in the alphabet so it shows up near the top of alphabetical blogrolls. I think I’ve succeeded well with the last two suggestions at least. I definitely didn’t want a newsy blog, or a tech tips blog, or anything like that. Too many people doing that well already, and way too many people doing it badly. I’ve tried to write the blog as I might an opinion column, not too heavy, but not too light. Also, I deliberately avoided some of the tips that supposedly go to make popular bloggers. I don’t link out much to other bloggers; I don’t write about others to provoke them to write about me; though I’m not averse to the occasional scrap, I don’t feel like the blog is very polemical; my goal has never been to get a high Technorati ranking; and despite my title, I wasn’t trying to become the voice of academic librarianship, or anything like that.

Instead, I’ve tried to present the opinions of one lone librarian rather than represent the opinions of others, and I’ve tried to present those opinions in as thoughtful a manner as possible. Though I write these as essays, that is, as short exploratory pieces that may not be fully formed, still I’ve tried to avoid writing poorly reasoned pieces I’m not willing to defend.

I’ve also tried to present a somewhat non-librarian point of view. This isn’t terribly difficult for me, because I’m sort of a librarian by default. If the market for Shakespeare scholars had been strong a dozen years ago, I would probably be happily teaching Shakespeare at some liberal arts college now. Instead, I stumbled into library school because it seemed like a better choice of career than adjunct rhetoric instructor. My motto at the time was “easy to get in, easy to get through, easy to get a job,” and I was right. Even now, I’d probably be just as happy teaching rhetoric full time, but I make a lot more money and have a lot more job security as a librarian, plus I don’t have to grade so many essays. So while I like being a librarian, and I think I’m pretty good at it, I don’t always think of myself as a librarian. I think of myself as a person who loves and uses academic libraries, who identifies with the scholarly and humanistic mission of liberal education, who enjoys teaching and reading, and who also happens to work as a librarian. I see the library not as an end in itself but as one part of a much larger educational mission, and I’ve tried to comment on library issues from that perspective.

In one way I’ve definitely failed. This was supposed to be a purely professional blog. Though I’ve written a couple of personal pieces for fun, like my wedding anniversary post, the goal was to focus on library issues, not on my personal life and certainly not on my library. I’ve done pretty well about not blogging the Princeton University Library. Occasionally I’ve mentioned or praised colleagues, but in general I see no benefit to blogging about my workplace, as opposed to my work. My library has good points and bad points like every library, and I could certainly tell some entertaining stories, but this blog isn’t the place for that. (See me at an ALA happy hour if you want to hear the good stuff!) However, what I didn’t count on, because I’d never done this much sustained public writing, was just how much of my personality would be on display on the blog, and I’m not sure how happy I am about that. In general, I’m a private and even reserved person with those who don’t know me. After looking back at the 100 or so posts I’ve written over the past year, it becomes clear what I think about, what my prejudices and assumptions are, what I care immensely about, and what I dismiss as folly in academic librarianship. Even that has exposed me more than I thought it would. On the other hand, I’ve grown more comfortable putting part of myself into the posts. Still, I won’t be sharing vacation photos or music recommendations with you, so you can rest easy.

To make a long post short (too late!), I thank all of you who have been reading the blog, and I very much appreciate those of you who send kind words. No more navel-gazing for now. Tomorrow I’m hoping to write about a couple of ALA programs I went to, including the one where we were told in earnest tones that the Internet is a very important part of modern communication. Stay tuned!

I’ve been thinking about a couple of my odder experiences in library school lately, possibly because I recently read my teaching evaluations from last fall and am also working on an article on the ethics of unobtrusive reference evaluation (which has required actual research, and has thus seriously cut into my blogging time). A chain of associations carried me back to an interaction I once had with a library school professor that I can only call an obtrusive teacher evaluation.

In one of those intro classes that anyone who could read could teach but apparently not teach well, we were required to write a one-page “essay.” I can’t remember if it was supposed to have any purpose, but probably not. Regardless, I cranked it out and handed it in. It came back with a grade of B. Okay, I could live with that, though it surprised me a bit, since I’m a competent writer. I was also surprised he’d turned one of my commas into a semicolon, thus creating a fragment, and turned my one semicolon into a comma, thus creating a run-on sentence. But everyone has their bad days when basic grammar is just too much trouble. However, I then found out in discussion with other students that everyone got a B. That is, every person in a very large class got a B. Nobody got an A. Nobody got a C, D, or F (are library schools allowed to fail anyone?). This seemed peculiar.

Still, I wasn’t going to complain. What’s one B more or less? But a couple of days later I was passing by the professor’s office and decided to ask him about it. Not so much about my grade, as about the odd fact that everyone got the exact same grade. When I asked him, he said they just all seemed like B papers to him. By that time I’d been teaching and grading essays in rhetoric and literature for a few years, and I found his answer very unsatisfactory. In a slightly disingenuous manner I asked him if he could articulate his grading standards for me, so that I might be able to meet them in the future. That is, what made a paper an A or a B or a C, what did he look at when grading, etc. At that point he started giving me the runaround, and it was clear that he had no idea. He didn’t know what made a good or bad essay, other than his gut “feeling.” Lots of people think grading essays is very subjective, but that’s not true. It’s fairly easy to articulate standards, and with common standards there’s often a broad consensus on proper grades. “Feeling” like a paper is one grade or another without being able to justify a grade is a mark of a bad teacher, and also means the teacher cannot guide those students who honestly do want to know what standards they need to meet to succeed.

We discussed this and some other teaching issues. The class in general was badly run and his teaching ethos was deteriorating quickly for me. Finally, his avoidance of straight answers led me to ask the most aggressive question I’ve ever asked one of my teachers. Angry at his vague evasiveness, I asked, “Have you ever taught before?” I felt a little bad, because he was a nice guy, well meaning and seemed kind, but I resent unqualified people being my instructors. After a bit more stammering, he admitted that he hadn’t taught before. So he hadn’t taught, hadn’t graded, and frankly couldn’t lead a discussion. And yet he had the power over my grade. I went to library school for free, and in this class I was getting what I paid for, which I suppose made up for the bargains I received in a few classes with good instructors.

I left in a huff, feeling angry both at having what I considered an unqualified professor and also at myself for letting it get to me. The denouement? From then on, every assignment I turned in got an A+, and there was still no explanation why. Probably he just didn’t want to have any more exchanges with that unreasonable, angry student.

I’ve been commanded to weed the Bs in our main reference room. The good thing is it gives me something to do at the reference desk. I’m finding it relatively easy to move out some things–e.g., the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, which I just found is digitized anyway, or the Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum–that I’m pretty sure are rarely, if ever, consulted here, and are quite old for reference books. Our library has subject study rooms with reference materials, and anyone likely to consult the Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum will also probably have a key to the religion study room.

My main questions are about all those specialized reference books, things like the Encyclopedia of Hell or the Historical Dictionary of Taoism. In a reference room tight on space, how specialized can a reference book be before it can safely go out to the circulating stacks. If the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism is on the shelf, can I let the Popular Dictionary of Buddhism fly and be free? Do I need ready access to four different encyclopedias of Hinduism? Or multi-volume encyclopedias of philosophy in four different languages? And if all the big sets and the main encyclopedias are available, why bother with the single volume specialized works?

Should I keep reference works that I’m almost positive no one is going to consult just because I like to have them there, even though I don’t consult them, either. Some old sets just seem like they belong, even if they’re quite dated. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics comes to mind. That could easily live elsewhere, but it just feels right on the shelf to me. My feelings on the matter, may, as usual, have to be sacrificed.

Oh well, no time to ponder further. I’ve been asked if I can get this done before ALA. I should have asked whether she meant Annual or next Midwinter.

Libraries often acquire the papers of famous writers, and these sometimes have drafts of stories, poems, or novels, so that interested scholars can see the process of writerly creation. Are those days dying? Most writers write on computers, I assume, and plenty probably don’t even print out drafts as they go along. Maybe they save them as separate drafts, but unless they’re thinking specifically of scholarly posterity everything might just be one Word file. Maybe one could examine the writing process by hitting Control-Z a million times.

Are there libraries or archives out there that are trying to acquire not just authors’ papers, but perhaps their hard drives as well? Instead of boxes upon boxes of paper, the entire creative life of a typical writer could probably be stored on a flash drive. Even without public digitization, such drives would be useful to study some writers. It’s just something I’ve been wondering about lately, but don’t know of any examples.

I’m always on the lookout for a good textbook on rhetoric and research for my writing seminar, and I’ve never found the perfect one. Bedford offers the best selection, but still I’ve never found anything completely suitable. Thus, I don’t use a textbook, and am forced to create my own handouts and guides in addition to the academic readings for the class. Ideally, the students in the seminar should learn how to write academic essays based upon sources which they often find through library research. They should learn how to discover, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize sources into their own argumentative essays. My class is based upon classical rhetoric, and that also plays a role. Many rhetoric textbooks that I’ve seen aren’t based on classical or even contemporary rhetoric, but instead upon some bastardized simplification suitable for the remedial student unprepared for college work.

When I first started teaching as a grad student, I remember all too well the mediocre textbooks I was forced to use. In addition to some hurried advice on research, there were assignments asking students to write two letters–one to their parents and one to their friends back home–describing the same party. Oooh, look how an awareness of audience changes your writing! Yawn. We’re also usually told that essays can be categorized by genre: exposition, narration, description, or persuasion, and we have to write all four separately, as if one could narrate well without description or persuade without exposition. “Tell us a story about something you did that you’ll never forget.” “Describe this aubergine.” “Explain (or expositate) for us how to make a pizza. Include every step!” Or better yet, there are invented forms, such as the problem-solving essay, a variation, I suppose, of the expository essay.

I still vividly recall one of these from about fifteen years ago. There was a pizza place in town that had incredibly cheap pizzas, which always tempted students to buy them. However, the pizzas weren’t very good and used cheap ingredients so that they tasted like rubbery cardboard. However, the student argued, this “problem” could be solved if the pizza place would just use slightly better and more expensive ingredients, thus making the pizzas better. QED.

It’s like the textbooks were designed deliberately to bore students and make them hate writing, or perhaps under the assumption that writing itself is boring and students are lazy idiots, so if we just break everything down for them into simplistic, unrealistic tasks we can all get through this together. If we just Taylorize the teaching of writing, everything will be easier. There are some notably good contemporary rhetorics out there that avoid this oversimplification, but none that I’ve found do things quite like I want them to.

The ideal for me would be a combination of two such books: Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, by Edward Corbett, and The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, both of which I highly recommend if you’re unfamiliar with them. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student sounds like it would be a good introductory text, but in fact the 4th edition is a 550+ page, detailed introduction to classical rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern (Upper-level to Graduate) Student would be a better title. The Modern Researcher, now in its 6th edition, seems to grow slimmer with each edition, but it’s still a 300+ page introduction to academic research. One can’t assign close to 900 pages of preparatory reading for a 12-week course and have any time left over for the other readings.

What I would love to see is a 150 page combination of these two works appropriate for the well prepared college freshman. The ideal book would cover the appeals and canons of classical rhetoric as well as the separate parts of classical arrangement and useful rhetorical concepts, plus provide concise sections on finding, evaluating, and analyzing sources through library research.

I’d like to write such a book myself, but I imagine the audience would be small. In spite of the fact that there are undoubtedly many people more qualified to write both the classical rhetoric and the library research portions, I think I’m in a good position to write this particular book. Classical Rhetoric and Modern Research has a nice sound to it. Unfortunately, I think the only audience might be my class, and no writer or publisher would take on a book likely to sell twelve copies a year. So I suppose for next Fall I’ll rely once more upon the mishmash of my own handouts and links out to other people. At least the students won’t have to buy any textbooks.

For the first time ever, I have submitted proposals to speak at conferences. Obviously I’m not exactly itching to be famous. Over the past month, I sent in two. As I was preparing my most recent one, I read the recent posts at Information Wants to Be Free complaining about librarians having to pay their own way to speak at conferences, and the disproportionately negative effect this has on newer librarians and librarians with poor institutional funding.

I feel most badly for those librarians on the tenure track who are more or less required to speak and yet also don’t receive adequate funding, and who also most likely aren’t particularly well paid as newish librarians at poorly funded libraries, but it’s not clear that we as a profession suffer because they can’t afford to speak at a particular conference or that it’s a problem for anyone but them specifically. Just being a good speaker or saying well what any number of librarians could say equally well isn’t necessarily a reason to feel bad that people can’t afford to speak. I also would want to know why the person wants to speak. If it’s required for the job, that’s one thing, but there are plenty of motivations for speaking that don’t particularly deserve any special sympathy.

There’s the professional advancement argument, for example. There’s the possibility that being a popular speaker might lead to better jobs. But how necessary is this? It’s not necessary for career development or getting good jobs, at least in my limited experience. I have a great job, and I’ve spoken and published very little. Is it the case that “famous” librarians get better jobs? I don’t know, but I do know it’s possible to get good jobs without being particularly well known, and I also know I can’t think of any librarians on the conference speaking circuit that I’d willingly trade jobs with.

Then there’s speaking just to speak more, to be “famous” for its own sake. I find this the least sympathetic motivation. Many people understandably thrive on widespread recognition and speaking offers. They want to be well known and desired, and I see nothing discreditable about that, but I also don’t see how it’s of any benefit either to anyone else or to the profession as a whole. For one thing, it leads to a saturation of the same old librarians and a limitation on new voices. Librarian celebrity perpetuates itself, so prominent speakers get asked to speak because people have heard of them, not necessarily because they have anything particularly relevant or fresh to say in the context of a particular program or conference. This is no insult to popular speakers. Speakers tend to be popular because they’re good at it. But there are other good library speakers who are never considered because they’re less prominent.

We’re getting closer to a reason for concern here, but I see no reason to sympathize with librarians who just want to become more prominent and might not have anything to say that isn’t already being said. After all, conferences seem to get speakers, and there are plenty of librarians motivated to speak because they just want to speak or because they have to for tenure and are funded adequately. And if we’re honest, do we really think there are that many librarians who have such novel contributions to make that we’d benefit from hearing them speak? Would they really be saying anything that isn’t already being said by other speakers and better funded librarians?

We just don’t know. That’s one reason why this would be a problem at all. Systematic exclusion of new library voices could very well be limiting useful contributions and interesting professional discussions, and newer librarians who haven’t yet been fully indoctrinated into traditional ideologies of librarianship might have a lot to offer. Without some change, we’ll never know.

I’ve argued that a problem of excluding these librarians from conference speaking and participation is that there’s at least the possibility they have novel and worthwhile contributions to make to the profession and that their voices won’t be heard, but we know that’s not exactly accurate. These librarians aren’t being silenced in any way. The biggest hole in my argument is that it’s easier than ever to put your ideas before librarians. Once upon a time one either wrote for the limited library press or one spoke at conferences, but times have changed. Any librarian with something to contribute can start a blog and put forth their ideas. So if these librarians have so much to contribute, why not just start a blog?

There are several reasons why not. For one, it’s not like one starts writing a blog and the world sits up and takes notice. Trust me on that one! Blogs also require some sort of sustainability. There’s a huge difference between having good ideas and sharing them at a few conferences and writing about those same ideas week after week. How many blogs have you seen that start up with a “Hello, World!” post about how excited the librarian is to be blogging and sharing professional ideas with the world, but then end six months later after a sporadic few posts that as often as not apologize for not blogging for a while?

Then there’s the difference between speaking and writing. Speaking and interacting with live human beings in a discussion of trends or ideas is very different from sitting alone with the laptop. Good writing takes effort, even if one has a sustainable blog, and a lot of librarians who might very well have good ideas and want to speak out might not write well. Also, blogs and conference presentations reach different audiences. There are a lot of librarians, perhaps the majority, who read no blogs at all, but who go to conferences and workshops. Thus, because of the difficulty of getting noticed, sustainability, writing ability, and audience, a blog will only be a useful approach to entering the professional conversation for certain types of librarians.

We’re still left with the question of whether excluding poorly funded library voices from conference participation excludes worthwhile and novel contributions that we otherwise would benefit from, and we still don’t know. I think the fact that librarians are required to speak at conferences but aren’t funded by their libraries is much more regrettable than that any specific library conference won’t compensate their speakers. Partly this is because of my conception of what a conference should be. I’d much rather conferences be considered places where professionals come together to confer with each other than gather to listen to the same group of “famous” librarians time after time, but this is more difficult to achieve when many librarians don’t have adequate funding in the first place. This is more a problem of insufficient institutional support for professional development, though, rather than a problem of conferences not paying for people. Paying people to speak at conferences goes against the idea that conferences are places for professionals to come together to confer with one another.

So not compensating some speakers means that some librarians who may have novel or useful contributions to make to the profession are not heard, but compensating speakers goes against the conception of a conference as a place where professionals come together to confer with one another. For me at least, I think it’s more important to address the issue of inadequate institutional funding than to expect to be compensated for speaking to your fellow professionals during an ordinary library conference.