This is sort of a follow up to But What If I Don’t Want it All, except I’ve decided to bring the personal to the professional, not because I like to expose myself, so to speak, but just to show what I think about when I think about moving up to another job. I don’t know how typical I am, but we’ll see. The discussion in that post was a presentation of arguments about why bright people might not want to be library directors. Here I’m talking mostly about myself and about a good job I didn’t apply for and some of the reasons why. The deadline for applications ended last week, so I feel safe talking about it. The temptation is over.

First, I should say that like a lot of librarians I’m somewhat geographically limited. My wife has a good and somewhat unusual job at ETS and we (sort of) own a house in New Jersey that we most likely couldn’t sell in this market. (But make me a good offer and we’ll talk!) Because of spousal and housing issues, debt, an uncertain economy, and my own risk averseness, the only way I could afford to just pick up and move out of the region would be a library job that essentially doubled my salary, an unlikely circumstance for a job one step up.

Which is why I paid particular attention to an ad for a job in the area. Very few jobs I see are even remotely tempting for me, but I came very close to applying for the job of Assistant Director of Research and Instructional Services at Penn. However, I didn’t apply. Believe me, it wasn’t them. It was me. I’m certainly not saying I would have been an ideal or even attractive candidate for this job, only that were I interested in moving up this would be the sort of job I’d apply for. Those are very different propositions.

For all I know it looks like a great job. I heard very nice things about both the department and the person this position would report to, and this from someone who actually works there. It’s also a large private research university, which is where I feel most comfortable. The job would be a natural next step in a career toward a directorship someday if that were my goal. In addition, a new job with more responsibility would bring new challenges and experiences, and that would be good for me professionally. Plus, I live two miles from a station with a train that would drop me off right in front of campus. Looking good so far.

I looked very closely at the job requirements, and thought I looked pretty good for everything except “effective supervisory experience.” I could possibly make a case that based on other experience and abilities I have the talent and capacity to be an effective supervisor, but that’s definitely missing from my resume and definitely a requirement, and possibly the most important one. The lack might have just gotten me tossed from the pile, but it’s possible that I’d have gotten a second look. Never hurts to try.

So why didn’t I apply? The possibility of getting thrown out of the pile because I haven’t supervised librarians was part of it, certainly. Nobody likes rejection, and why waste everyone’s time. In addition, there was the tally I did of the pros and cons of getting the job versus staying in my own.

I’ve listed the pros, but then I thought of the cons. First and foremost, I like my job. I like the library, I like the students, I like the departments, and I like a lot of my colleagues. I like collection development. I also like the fact that I get to teach a class each year. All this brings a variety to my work that I enjoy. I also have a lot of flexibility and autonomy in my work, which could disappear in an administrative job. And just in general I feel like my work and opinions are respected. Variety, flexibility, autonomy, respect. These are not job attributes to be dismissed lightly. I calculated how high an offer would have to be to make it worth my while to give up known goods and compensate for unknown burdens, and it seemed to me highly unlikely based on the statistics that Penn or anyplace else would pay that much for this particular position, especially for someone without “effective supervisory experience.”

About the only things I don’t like are my commute (which would actually be a bit longer to Penn) and the fact that my office has no window. When you think about it, this isn’t much to dislike, and both things are tangential to the job itself. I never dread work. I never get that Sunday evening panic some people get, though that’s possibly because I do chat reference most Sunday evenings. I won’t say it’s stress free, because it is sometimes stressful, but it’s never stress in that bad way where one sinks into a severe work-related depression and contemplates killing oneself or others.

Why am I writing about this? Because I see the questions come up. Why aren’t more people applying for what look like good jobs? Why is it so hard to find librarians for management jobs, especially AUL and director positions? Are there just too few people experienced enough? Have libraries not been grooming managers? This is probably part of the case. Or are our standards unreasonable? This could also be. I do think libraries are going to have to take chances on talent in the future, and realize that being younger than the average librarian doesn’t necessarily mean one can’t effectively supervise other librarians.

Or are people just unwilling to make certain sacrifices, as Steven’s post hinted? Though there are librarians who have a contempt for management as such or think particular jobs would be too much work, I suspect that a lot of the reasons have more to do with an inability to make sacrifices rather than an unwillingness. Sometimes it’s a work/life balance issue, but also people are entrenched for various reasons, and the longer one stays the harder it becomes to leave. Spouses have jobs. Children are in school. Parents are in retirement homes. People like their jobs. Friends of 10, 20, 30 years live in the area. Moving is disruptive and stressful. Starting a new job is stressful. For some librarians it’s probably not that they’d mind working later or taking the responsibility, it’s just that they don’t want to totally disrupt their lives and those of their families for such jobs. Or it could be that libraries in general don’t pay enough to make many librarians consider uprooting their families. How much might it take to uproot the rooted? Companies paying their salespeople $250K/year never seem to have trouble relocating those people.

Other than economics, it seems to me the other motivating factors are desperation and desire. If I hated my job or were very dissatisfied, I’d be constantly on the market and be more willing to relocate or move on. The other factor is desire. If I really, really, really wanted to move up into administration, then perhaps other issues wouldn’t have as important a place in calculation. Spouse has a job? She can find another one! Salary not that much better than my current one, all things considered? Think of the satisfactions of having more responsibility and a more exalted job title and being a step further up the ladder! Reduced flexibility and added responsibility would be a big burden on the family? Hey, what’s more important, my family or my career! But would the benefits of this overcome the burdens and offset the loss of current goods? It’s hard to say. With every change comes loss of something, and sometimes we just don’t want to lose those things.

The people have spoken, the results are in, and it turns out I’m both a loser and a winner in my RUSA elections. I did win my election to be the RUSA CODES Member-at-Large. Thanks RUSA CODES people! On the other hand, I got throughly stomped in my election for RUSA RSS Vice-Chair/ Chair-Elect, but thanks anyway to the people who voted for me. I’d like to congratulate my opponent on waging a clean, fair, and generous campaign, and express regret that I won’t be able to continue my fight to take RSS power away from the lobbyists and special interests and give it back to the people. Since this is the fourth year in a row I’ve lost an RSS election, I’m starting to think they don’t like me very much. I’m tempted to say, “You won’t have Bivens-Tatum to kick around anymore, because this is my last blog post!” (I hope you get that allusion.) The silliest thing about the whole situation is that I didn’t much want to run in the first place, wasn’t at all sure I wanted to win (LOTS of work), and yet I feel bad losing. Humans are such absurd creatures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Last night I taught a BI session, and after demonstrating a couple of databases, a bright and impatient student asked if we had a way to search all of the databases simultaneously with the same search. We do in fact have a federated search function, which after three years is still labeled a pilot service on our website. (I would give you the link, but you wouldn’t even be able to see the page without being on the campus network.) I rarely mention the federated search engine because I haven’t found it very useful. I said that theoretically we did have a way to do this, but that I didn’t like to use it. However, let’s try a search and see what happens.

We were searching theater (chin* AND theat* AND brecht as keywords was the search if you want to try this at home, boys and girls) and had found 313 records in the International Index to the Performing Arts using this search before narrowing the search some. The federated search on the theater database page simultaneously searches the IIPA, American Drama, MLA, JSTOR, Oxford Reference Online: Performing Arts, the Essay and General Literature Index, and the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online. The student was running the demonstration computer, so he did the search. Despite all the databases being selected, it searched only American Drama, and found nothing, naturally.

Then several other students did the same search, and each found a different result. The other students did all manage to get results from the IIPA. One got 64 results, another 101, another 152, and another 313, which is the number we got from the direct search. Needless to say, it was weird, but made my point that while there are some benefits to federated searching, there were also some problems. It’s possible not everyone was doing the same search, though they claimed to be.

It’s really too bad, because I was a proponent of the federated search feature before we implemented it, and it was only after using it more that I found it less helpful than I thought it would be. I wanted it because of the simplicity I thought it would bring to novice researchers. I had in mind just the sort of student who asked the question last night. If we take last night’s search, IIPA was an excellent place to begin, as I had already told them. The federated search (when it worked at all) was good for directing them to a database that was both searchable and appropriate. Even with the varying searches, IIPA always had more than all of them except JSTOR. But to narrow the search in IIPA, one still has to go into the IIPA itself. Even trying to view the record to see what descriptors might help narrow the search takes you out of the federated search engine and into the database. At this point, instead of this search engine, I’d just as soon have Google Scholar searching through all of our databases, that is, if Google Scholar worked better.

Stephanie Willen Brown’s post at ACRLog on teaching Dialog in a reference course both puzzled and intrigued me.

First, the puzzlement. My first thought was, how quaint. That must be the first thought of a lot of librarians, or the apologetic post would not have been necessary. However, that was also my first thought when I encountered Dialog for the first and last time in my own basic reference class at the University of Illinois ten years ago. It was a summer reference class, and I don’t remember much about it, except being taught Dialog. In 1998 this seemed quaint, and that was before Google tricked the world into thinking search was always simple. The odd queries, the per search payment, the pre-search calculations of what might be effective–all these already seemed old fashioned to me, and I wasn’t even a librarian yet. After ten years of reference work, it seems even more old fashioned. In general, I’m not opposed to old fashioned, and in fact am quite comfortable with it, but nevertheless that’s how my Dialog training struck me.

Then, the intrigue. But wait, maybe the problem is me. I’ll be the first to admit that with things I don’t quite understand. Is it that I’m an academic librarian and don’t do any fee-based searching, so I can just be as sloppy as I like? Or did those couple of weeks on Dialog teach me important lessons on searching databases? I’m not the best reference librarian I’ve ever worked with, but I’m pretty good at searching databases effectively. Did the exposure to Dialog help? Reflecting on this, I’d still have to say, no. It may teach “how databases are structured beneath the hood,” but I got that lesson without doing much Dialog searching.

To digress slightly, though, I’m not sure how much I got out of that reference course. My best reference class was a humanities reference class, and the best training was a year and a half at the information desk in the UIUC Main Library and the intensive apprenticeship we all underwent. Maybe if we’d worked with Dialog there, I’d have fonder memories of it. I learned much of what I know about reference there, so if I can’t search Dialog effectively I have only Beth Woodard to blame.

Brown also linked to a 2001 essay by Carol Tenopir on all the lessons Dialog can easily teach LIS students, lessons on indexing, boolean operators, proximity operators, controlled vocabulary, etc. All important, undoubtedly. But is Dialog the best way to teach such things? Possibly, but it still seems quaint to me. Then again, maybe that’s why nobody asks me to teach reference.