I bought an ebook copy of Walt Crawford’s new book The Big Deal and the Damage Done and have read or skimmed it all. It analyzes serials and monograph spending from all types of academic libraries every which way. Chart after chart demonstrates the dramatic restructuring of library budgets most likely because of one relatively recent publishing model, the Big Deal. It lends some quantitative support to my contention that Big Deals screw the humanities, and really anything else that isn’t a STEM ejournal. The final paragraph:

What I do believe: If things continue along the same line as they have from 2000 to 2010, the damage done may become irreparable, as a growing number of academic libraries become little more than subsidized article transfer mechanisms. That would be a shame.

If you’re at all interested in the issue, definitely get a copy. I’ll be writing more about it in my Academic Newswire column for next week, so I won’t say more about it now.

Around this time last year Library Juice Press released my book Libraries and the Enlightenment, which, by the way, not nearly enough of you have purchased. It’s had some good reviews, although it hasn’t exactly been a runaway bestseller. Perhaps the reason is because people were waiting for it to come out in Japanese translation. Now it has, from the Kyoto Library and Information Science Research Society. You can purchase it here for 3500 yen.

I’ve never been translated before that I know of, so it’s kind of cool, even if I can’t read the language. According to Google Translate, the title translates as Enlightenment and Library. That seems close enough to me. If it turns out to be a big hit in Japan, maybe I’ll follow Jimmy James’ lead and have it translated back into English and republished. If you don’t know what I mean, find a copy of Super Karate Monkey Death Car, a very funny episode from season 4 of NewsRadio. Jimmy James is the executive in charge of everything, and his Jimmy James: Capitalist Lion Tamer was unsuccessful in the U.S., but became a huge hit in Japan. So it was retranslated from the Japanese into Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler. The best line from the book at his book reading: “Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match.”

While catching up with my RSS feeds after ACRL and trying to avoid all the horrible news being reported this week I ran across a post by Jessica Olin at Letters to a Young Librarian about Cults of Librarian Personalities. It addresses “the Rock Star Librarian / Cults of Librarian Personalities phenomenon.” Apparently, there was a Rock Star Librarian who spoke at ACRL and I didn’t even realize it, or at least someone Jessica considers a “Big Name in Libraries, a Rock Star Librarian, an inspiration for a Cult of Librarian Personality.” I took a quick look through the conference program to try to figure out who she means, but since she also thinks the person is an “utter tool,” it’s probably best not to speculate, at least in public.

The thing is, I have different reactions to such people depending on whether we think of them as Big Names in Libraries, Rock Star Librarians, or the leader of a Cult of Librarian Personality. The phrase “rock star” applied to any librarians has always struck me as sort of funny. In the big scheme of things, librarians are such relatively marginal professionals that to think of any of them being actually famous is strange. What librarian could say, echoing Jon Bon Jovi, “I’ve seen a millions faces, and I’ve provided information to them all!” A cult of librarian personality is maybe even stranger. Do librarians have groupies? Or dedicated groups of admirers? Fan clubs? Or even people who dote on their every word? I’m not aware of any who do. Or is the suggestion that there are some librarians who would like a cult of personality to form around them? That might be true, if a bit creepy. Maybe the problem some people have isn’t with Rock Star Librarians as such, but with librarians who are deliberately seeking to be Rock Stars. On the other hand, groupies would be nice, if for no other reason than carrying my stuff around for me at conferences.

Then there’s the Big Name in Libraries designation, which seems to me much less loaded a phrase. But what makes a Big Name in Libraries? The Big Name at ACRL apparently writes articles, blog posts, and books, and also obviously speaks at conferences. Is that what makes someone a big name? I do that kind of thing but wouldn’t consider myself a Big Name. Maybe the Big Name has to be somebody on the conference circuit. I’ve done some speaking at conferences, and am slated to do some more (ALA Annual 2014 about library values; put it on your calendar!), but I don’t try hard to get speaking gigs. In fact, I rarely speak unless invited, and I’m just not invited that much. So the Big Names are probably those who you can’t go to a conference without escaping, whereas I am imminently escapable. Everyone can just not read a blog, but if you go to ALA or ACRL, there are names it’s hard to avoid seeing if you look through the conference programs, even if you never go hear those people speak. Those are the people I usually think of as Big Names. But are they Big Names because they’re speaking all over the place, or are they speaking all over the place because they’re Big Names?

Or is it the people who have a “brand”? I’ve written before about fame and hedgehog librarians, the librarians who know One Big Thing (or rather, are publicly known for knowing One Big Thing). Sometimes these librarians seem to spring from nowhere to librarian fame quickly and almost without effort. They do just the right thing at the right time, and suddenly everyone wants to hear from them. And sometimes these librarians are just persistent, even if ultimately no one cares about their One Big Thing. Persistence counts for a lot. If you have a coherent message and write enough and apply to speak at conferences enough, eventually you’ll be heard, or at least seen. You’ll at least be “famous” as that librarian who always speaks and writes about that One Big Thing. That post was written almost five years ago, and back then I opined that I’d never be librarian famous because I couldn’t stick to One Big Thing. Even though since then I’ve managed to write a book about libraries, and have even identified a couple of areas I could make into One Big Things if I chose, I think that analysis probably still holds up. I don’t have the concentration for the One Big Thing, but I do think that’s what helps make Big Name Librarians.

Jessica asks in her conclusion, “What do you all think of this phenomenon? Do you avoid Big Name Librarians at all cost? Seek them out because you love to hate them? Have a true fondness for one or more of them?”

I think it’s less of an issue than some librarians might, and I tend to see the so-called Big Name Librarians as people passing through the limelight on the way back to relative obscurity. Sure, some will stay well known throughout their careers, but even in my brief time in the profession (if 13 years can be considered brief), I’ve already seen some stars shoot and then fade away. Plus, in the end they’re still librarians going back to their libraries and doing the same sort of jobs we all do. I definitely don’t think about Big Names enough to avoid or hate them. It wouldn’t occur to me to like or dislike someone for being popular at the moment, although I might avoid them because advocates of One Big Thing tend to grow stale after a while.

I need to reorganize my home library soon. Now I’m thinking librarian groupies would be perfect to help with that. Maybe I should reconsider the librarian fame game.

The Ithaka US Faculty Survey 2012 is out, possibly making some librarians who read it fret that the library isn’t the center of the faculty universe and librarians are hovering on the margins of that universe. Given that “the role of the library” occupies eight pages of a 79-page document, that’s hardly surprising. This year they asked a new question apparently designed to make librarians feel bad about themselves. Here’s the summary of the question and response:

Finally, we asked scholars to rate how important it was to them that “the library helps undergraduates develop research, critical analysis, and information literacy skills.” In the Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2010 of deans and directors, when this role was first introduced into this module, it was rated as very important by virtually all of the library leaders who responded. Among faculty, however, only slightly over half rated this role as very important…. In general, a substantially smaller share of faculty members rated each role as very important than did library deans and directors; the only role on which there was agreement was the library’s buyer role.

“Virtually all of the library leaders” thought this was important but “slightly over half” of professors. I’d be curious whether the response would change if “critical analysis” and “information literacy” were dropped, the former because librarians play relatively little role in this compared to coursework and the latter because nobody besides librarians knows what the heck information literacy is. Would “librarians help students do library research” have gotten a better response?

Not that there was a lot of response, as Barbara Fister points out in A Surfeit of Surveys and Three Short Questions. A 3.5% response rate. Is that good? I’m no social science expert, so I turned to Wikipedia, which tells me that while a higher response rate used to be considered a sign of higher accuracy, “such studies have finally been conducted in recent years, and they are challenging the presumption that a lower response rate means lower survey accuracy.” Here’s the supporting evidence:

One early example of a finding was reported by Visser, Krosnick, Marquette and Curtin (1996) who showed that surveys with lower response rates (near 20%) yielded more accurate measurements than did surveys with higher response rates (near 60 or 70%).[2] In another study, Keeter et al. (2006) compared results of a 5-day survey employing the Pew Research Center’s usual methodology (with a 25% response rate) with results from a more rigorous survey conducted over a much longer field period and achieving a higher response rate of 50%. In 77 out of 84 comparisons, the two surveys yielded results that were statistically indistinguishable. Among the items that manifested significant differences across the two surveys, the differences in proportions of people giving a particular answer ranged from 4 percentage points to 8 percentage points.[3]

So if response rates near 20% were more accurate than response rates near 60-70%, does that mean a response rate near 3% is even more accurate? I guess by the time you get down to just calling that one professor you met that time and asking questions the accuracy should be just about perfect. It’s just possible that this report has no scientific or even social scientific validity. The other issue with reports like this is that they never tell you anything specific or applicable to your own campus. Thus, it could be that the survey isn’t valid and it has nothing to say about your campus.

Fister suggests that since so many faculty believe that librarians have no role in student learning librarians “should stop writing so many articles about information literacy for other librarians and think about reaching the faculty. Just a thought.” Someone commenting on her post agrees:

You offer a suggestion that I’d like to pick up on – that librarians should be writing about information literacy to professors, not to fellow librarians. Agreed, but the fact is that there is no market for it. Higher education journals rarely include anything on information literacy. I tried to sell a book manuscript on information literacy to a higher education publisher whose products are low-cost and accessible. The publisher’s senior higher education editor described my manuscript as “impressive and significant” and then turned it down. Why? Because “there’s no market for information literacy books among educators.” I later published the book with a library-oriented publisher, hoping (and having some success at it) that professors will read it.

What we could take away from this is that no educators care about the things librarians do, hence the lack of a market. Or, and here’s the more optimistic interpretation, there’s no market for books about information literacy among educators because it’s librarian jargon nobody else uses. To take a phrase only librarians use and then complain that nonlibrarians aren’t interested in it is frustrating and counterproductive. What about books on things other academics think they know about? Library research skills, perhaps. There seems to be a market somewhere for books like that. OUP published Thomas Mann’s Library Research Models and Princeton University Press published my colleague Mary George’s The Elements of Library Research. Neither are exactly bestsellers, but they’re both still in print and they belie the claim that there’s no market among educators for works about what librarians do. Some instructors assign Mary’s book to students, so some educators must know about it. Maybe the problem isn’t the content, but the phrasing. Unless librarians learn to talk like other academics, they will be much less likely to be listened to.

Nevertheless, librarians might find other reasons to fret. The situation reminds me of Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism, because why not. In section 12 of The Will to Power (or 11 [99] if you have a copy of the Writings from the Late Notebooks handy], Nietzsche describes what he believes are causes of nihilism. First, “nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a ‘meaning’ in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged.” Nietzsche was talking about meaning in the large sense, the meaning of life, the universe, etc. If we believe that the meaning of life is to dedicate ourselves to doing good works to please the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and we find that Pastafarianism is in fact false, we might become discouraged. The second form of nihilism comes when we believe the world has value because of some unifying source out there, like if we thought the world was worthwhile because we could become one with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Then we find out there’s no such thing, and believe life and the world are valueless. First we might come to believe the world has no overarching goal for human beings, and then that there is “no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value.” If we believe that life has meaning only because of something we no longer believe exists, or that life is only bearable if there is a supreme being for us to immerse ourselves in but then we cease to believe in that supreme being, then we might be frustrated.

Okay, so what does this have to do with librarians, information literacy, or the Ithaka Survey? Let’s think about the frustrations of librarians with libraries, the academy, or even the world as they find them. Frustration often occurs because of a difference between our expectations about the world and the world as we find it. We base our value and meaning on something we expect or hope to find in the world; we don’t find that thing; so we begin to doubt ourselves.

Librarians are sometimes frustrated that faculty don’t use librarians as much as librarians would like to be used; that faculty don’t see a value in information literacy; and that faculty think of the library as a place that buys stuff and makes it available, not as a place where librarians are supposedly just as engaged in the teaching and learning enterprise as they are. (Obviously by faculty I mean those members of the faculty who are not librarians. That’s a different thorny issue I’ve been staying away from.) Often enough the response is sheer surprise. “But I do so much!” Yes, you do a lot. Sometimes the reaction is a pledge to do more outreach to make the faculty aware of what librarians can do. All well and good.

But what if we acknowledge that the faculty, such that are left, know what they’re doing and know what they need from the library. Let’s look at it from their perspective. They have PhDs, have completed dissertations, published articles and books, are either on the tenure track working like crazy for tenure or else contingent faculty teaching like crazy for food and rent. They’ve been using libraries successfully for a long time. Who are we to tell them they don’t know better? They don’t want services, they want stuff. That’s just the way it is. They don’t need you like you want them to think they do.

And their perceptions of what librarians can do for students? So half of the survey respondents think that librarians have no role to play? Well, that’s just the way it is, too. Professors aren’t  there when the befuddled student wanders up to the reference desk to ask a question. They’re not with librarians engaging in research consultations trying to reconcile a class assignment with a doable research strategy. They’re not there when a consultation turns into an advising session on the topic of the essay that really the instructor should be doing.

Or there’s the frustration that professors won’t let librarians into their classrooms. This is pretty common. Even one of my former library school students who was himself a professor admitted he didn’t let librarians in the classroom. Why is that, we might wonder? Well, based on my experience and a brief analysis of courses in the humanities where I work, the reason might be that most courses don’t really have a library research component. A lot of undergraduate classes don’t require research essays as such. They require essays, but the point of the essay is to show that students have mastered a certain amount of material and can write critically about it analyzing and synthesizing as appropriate. That’s why if they need sources, they tend to ask their professor or use course readings. A recent Educause study on undergraduates and information technology claimed that, “it is interesting to note that when students were asked ‘When it comes to your success as an undergraduate, what is the one website or online resource you couldn’t live without?’ the most frequently cited sources were Google (33%) and Blackboard (16%); both of these significantly outranked students’ citing the college or university library website (5%).” It’s only interesting to note if you’re not a student and everything you need to know to complete all your courses isn’t on Blackboard. Librarians want every course to require library research, but library research as such is a small portion of what students are expected to learn in four years.

There are areas where libraries and librarians can demonstrate their value, but being highly thought of as information literacy providers or educators by most of the faculty isn’t one of those areas. If we assume that libraries aren’t the center of the faculty universe and that librarians are never going to be generally seen as equal partners in the educational enterprise, then the sort of results we find in the Ithaka and similar reports provides us no basis for concern. If those sorts of results upset you at all, the problem could very well be with your expectations about the world, not the world itself. So even if the survey was statistically valid, which it probably isn’t, or said something specifically applicable about your campus, which it probably doesn’t, there’s really no reason to worry.

The curious case of Edwin Mellen just gets curiouser and curiouser. Scholarly Kitchen has removed two posts by Rick Anderson regarding the EMP/Askey lawsuits, although, as Infodocket points out, the original posts are still available on the Wayback Machine. They removed the posts because EMP threatened to “pursue legal action not only against him, but against your organization as well.” They posted the letters from the attorney in their place. Interesting reading.

I wonder what damages a publisher the most: someone writing a critical blog post, or a series of lawsuits and threatened lawsuits that target a number of academic librarians, which then go public and anger the very librarians who buy (or now maybe won’t buy) so many of the publisher’s books? I guess we’ll find out.

[Update: on a somewhat related note, EMP has apparently registered domain names in Askey’s name. See the evidence at Roy Tennant: Digital Libraries. Curiouser and curiouser.]

After the announcement by my lover and tormenter Google about the impending demise of Google Reader, I decided it was time to broaden my distribution channels for the blog since RSS might be in flux for a while.  Thus, I have finally started a Twitter account for distributing links to posts here as well as my occasional columns at the Library Journal and possibly other stuff as time goes by. The Twitter page is here: https://twitter.com/acadlibrarian. I’ve tweeted the last few blog posts and columns to get started, and will continue to do so in future. So if you want to follow me there instead of just visiting or relying on RSS, please do so.

Some seem to think Google’s announcement means the end of RSS, although given the panic by so many people after Google’s announcement, I don’t think it’s dying. I just think that Google isn’t making money off it, which isn’t the same thing. Along with everyone else, I’ve been trying to find a replacement. After trying several options, I’ve settled on Newsblur for now. I got the premium account for the librarian-friendly rate of $12/year. The first couple of weeks it was slow dealing with all the new traffic, but it’s sped up after some back end work and is quite responsive now. Google’s announcement was the gentle push I needed to keep steadily diversifying my online life so that I’m not so reliant on one Internet giant. I’m now reliant only Google for only Gmail and Bookmarks, although I fear Bookmarks might go the way of Reader and all the other abandoned Google Projects.

I have a very tightly controlled information gathering system set up with RSS that is high on signal and low on noise because my goal is to get the best relevant information while spending the least possible time. Based on my experience with Facebook, I’m wary of Twitter as an information gathering tool on par with RSS, but if you have any suggestions of library/information professional people to follow who post good professional stuff with a minimum of personal stuff, please let me know and I’ll give them a try.

Once you get on the guru train, it’s hard to get off. That thing just barrels along regardless of reason and good sense. So here goes one more guru post. The title promised a skill, but as with rhetoric, it’s really more that you develop a set of skills through this line of study. Analytical skills, critical thinking skills, problem solving skills. Surely these are necessary for all librarians, and if you want to develop them to your utmost, you’ve got to study philosophy. When a lot of people think about philosophy, they think of great historical philosophers, or perhaps of something like a “life philosophy.” But philosophy is also, perhaps mostly, a method, not a body of knowledge. It’s a method for thinking clearly, asking questions, and solving problems.

To get an idea of what sort of skills philosophy can develop, we can do a brief survey of some philosophy department websites that try to explain the benefits of philosophy over some supposedly more practical major. Here’s what they say at Harvard:

Philosophy is a discipline requiring skills in reasoning and writing. Thus, the study of philosophy helps a person to develop the abilities to:

• Read texts closely
• Analyze positions critically
• Uncover tacit presuppositions
• Construct cogent arguments, and
• Explain and argue in clear persuasive writing.

These skills are extremely useful in many other disciplines beyond philosophy and for a range of careers, such as law, computer science, business, medicine, writing, the arts, publishing, and many others. The abilities to write well and to “think outside the box” are in high demand from employers, and will serve students well in their post-college life.

 

Don’t those sound like skills that would be useful for librarians? Here’s another list from Florida State:

The study of philosophy enhances one’s ability:

• To think, speak, and write clearly and critically,
• To communicate effectively,
• To form original, creative solutions to problems,
• To develop reasoned arguments for one’s views,
• To appreciate views different from one’s own,
• To analyze complex material, and
• To investigate difficult questions in a systematic fashion.

Communicating effectively? Forming solutions to problems? That’s pretty much my job. Are those skills as well developed in you as they could be after a rigorous study of philosophy? I suspect not, which is why you should go study philosophy, after you study rhetoric but before you study something else, because this is my guru train and I’m not allowing any other riders. Regardless, you can’t know until you do it, so do it. If you’re not yet persuaded, here’s another good list of reasons to study philosophy. It teaches you:

1. How to read critically (i.e., a book, magazine article, newspaper, P&L statement, web traffic report, etc.).

2. How to write well. (this could be an email, letter, report, blog, or living will).

3. How to debate and speak in front of large audiences.

4. How to create impromptu arguments and analysis (this may be the number one business skill of all time and Iíd hire someone with this skill set versus a Harvard graduate any day).

5. How to figure out what is right and wrong (ethics) and identify with different sorts of people and cultures (this is critical in the modern workforce, think how different your job is from what you see on Mad Men each week).

6. How to apply logic to any problem.

7. How to think strategically or see the “big picture.”

8. How to think about a problem by deconstructing the big picture and looking at the details.

Isn’t that what we want? Big picture librarians who can also look at the details? People who can create impromptu analysis or apply logic to any problem? People who can identify with different sorts of people and cultures? All these are essential for effective librarians. Finally, here’s a summary from the Princeton philosophy department about the study of philosophy and your future:

Skills acquired by concentrating in philosophy can thus be useful for a variety of careers. But the main benefit lies in learning to think in an organized way about confusing and controversial questions; to treat one’s beliefs as serviceable as they are but capable of improvement; to react to criticism not with outrage or fear but with a willingness to state the grounds for one’s views and to listen to and learn from the views of others. These are habits of thought useful not only in a career, but in life.

Imagine if more librarians could react to criticism not with outrage or fear but with a willingness to state the grounds for their views and listen to and learn from the views of others. That would be refreshing indeed. Useful not only in a career, but in life. All I can say is hear, hear!

So we have a range of skills developed through the study of philosophy: critical thinking, analysis, problem-solving, clear and organized communication, a balanced temperament to criticism that ultimately leads to better solutions to problems. Every one of these are essential to a career in librarianship, and the rigorous study of philosophy improves these types of skills perhaps more than any other field. Critical thinking, communication, and problem solving: boiled down to its essentials, that’s what my job is all about. That’s probably true for a lot of you as well. Thus, to be a better librarian, you should go study philosophy. Right now. Every one of you.

==========

Now, it might seem that with the post on rhetoric and this one on philosophy, I’m merely talking about areas of study I’m relatively knowledgable about, emphasizing skills that I’m relatively good at, arguing the almost irrefutable point that everyone would benefit from having these skills, and then telling you every librarian needs these skills at a high level. That’s exactly what I’m doing. That’s how the guru argument works.

Let’s go back to the example that started me off on this little series, whether all librarians need to learn how to code proficiently. I say no, and I’ve yet to see a persuasive argument for that position. What I’ve seen are librarians saying how useful coding skills have been for them. How could I argue with that? I’ve seen librarians saying coding skills might be good for all librarians to learn. Okay, I can possibly agree with that. Lots of things might be good for all librarians to learn, like rhetoric and philosophy. I haven’t seen this particular claim, but I might even agree that all librarians would be improved in some way if they learned to code proficiently. Every acquired skill enhances us somehow, and teaches us to view the world differently and increase our ability to function and solve problems. But none of those claims support the view that all librarians need to learn to code proficiently.

The same claims could be made about numerous skills, in particular the kind I’ve been talking about in these last two posts. There’s a difference between saying, “learning this might benefit librarians,” and saying, “all librarians need to learn this.” The first is moderate and potentially good advice. The second is immoderate guru-speak. “I do this. It helps me. Everyone else needs to do it, too.” The problem is, we have a finite amount of time, lots of things to learn, and specialization within libraries that doesn’t require everyone to have the same skills in the same capacity. I was speaking about this with one of our digital projects coders last week. We concluded that just as I don’t have to be able to write code proficiently, he doesn’t have to be able to teach research skills to students effectively. (He also, by the way, thinks the job ads are increasingly looking not for librarians with some coding skill but for people with hard core coding skills to then come work in libraries, which reframes the whole librarian coding argument into one about “feral librarians.”)

What I’ve been trying to do is expose the problematic reasoning behind guru-type claims about any skills or knowledge or future predictions for librarians. They’re all suspect, and the more hyperbolic they are the more suspect they become. I don’t see how you could reasonably deny that the skills I’ve addressed in these last two posts would benefit you both professionally and personally if you spent years acquiring or improving them. And yet you still probably think that you have better things to do, and that you know what’s better for you in your job than I do.

You might be right, but by guru logic you can’t make that claim, because the guru knows best. All such claims rest on something the guru can’t prove but that you can’t quite disprove. After all, unless you know what the guru knows, how can you really know that you don’t need to know what the guru knows? You get along fine in your job without learning some particular set of skills? No, you just think you do!

Instead of wading into pointless arguments, I want you to see beyond the hype and curious reasoning, and have been trying to show you how. Oh, and the reason I’ve been able to do this? Rhetoric and philosophy. Go study them. Every one of you.

This is sort of a follow up to my post on ignoring gurus and sherpas, which one person described as “odd” while reading it got another person “hot under the collar” and made yet another person “cranky.” Since the last two people seem to more or less agree with me, then I must be doing something wrong. One problem is that there were two discussions going on in the post, one about coding for librarians and one about not following gurus and sherpas. They got mixed together, and as often happens when I say that I don’t do whatever tech thing someone thinks I should do and yet I get on just fine, people get cranky because they think I’m claiming that no librarian should do that tech thing or perhaps even that I think that thing isn’t valuable for any librarians to do. I truly don’t understand that interpretation, but there it is. Maybe it’s my tone.

So let’s avoid the tech talk. Here’s really why I don’t follow sherpas or sit at the feet of gurus: I, in the  words of Fleetwood Mac, go my own way. I march to the beat of my own drummer. I follow my own muse. I cultivate my own garden. I live and let live. Okay, I’m out of cliches. As it’s put in what’s becoming one of my favorite books, the Daoist classic book of Zhuangzi (or Chuang Tzu), I wander free and easy, wander where I will, or go rambling without a destination (depending on the translation).

That means I don’t follow conventional wisdom or the wisdom of crowds. I don’t do things because they’re cool or trendy or popular, nor do I do things because they’re traditional or conventional or just the way they’ve always been done. I don’t do things because someone who isn’t me and doesn’t live my life tells me they need to be done even when I’m pretty sure they don’t need to be. I also don’t fall into the hipster trap of reacting against the popular or the trendy and trying to be ironic while still actually being concerned with what other people are doing or thinking. I honestly don’t care. I’m not a follower or a fan boy or a fashionista. My mother used to say in exasperation, do what you want to do because that’s what you’re going to do anyway. I did and I do.

This isn’t a professional position so much as a personal disposition reflected in most areas of my life, and I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. Even in high school the bulk of my learning was done outside school, and I followed my passions without a concern for what the world or the culture thinks is important. I don’t judge myself by other people’s standards, and I try (and this is much harder) not to judge other people by my standards. If I’d lived my life by what other people thought I should have done to be “successful,” I wouldn’t have majored in English in college, and then double-majored in philosophy. How impractical! I wouldn’t have gone to grad school in English. Even more impractical! Library school was practical, but it’s not exactly what the culture considers the beginning of worldly success. As long as I have access to a research library and the opportunity to learn about whatever I want to learn, I don’t really care what the world thinks is successful. A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and a research library beside me in the wilderness, then wilderness were paradise enough.

In my personal life, it’s led to me espousing unconventional views and having unconventional habits. For example, I don’t eat meat because I have ethical objections against factory farming and the treatment of animals (and yet I don’t think animals have rights as such, which makes me unconventional even in unconventional circles). I don’t proselytize about it or try to make other people feel bad for eating meat, and yet over the years I’ve encountered many people who seem to be personally offended by my not eating meat. Those people weren’t wandering free and easy. I haven’t watched a television show with commercial breaks since 1987. I don’t like anything interrupting my narrative and I refuse to pay for cable and Tivo, so until the rise of Netflix I just didn’t watch any TV. And yet, as with not eating meat, I’ve met people who seemed to be offended that I didn’t do the popular thing they did. They took my lack of interest in conventional activities almost as an affront, as if I’m judging them harshly for doing whatever it is that I don’t do, when really I couldn’t care less how they spend their time. Those people weren’t wandering free and easy. People like that seem to validate their own beliefs and actions by the standards of other people. I don’t bother and am much happier for it. We won’t even get started about my religious or political beliefs.

In my professional life, this attitude has manifested itself in various ways. I avoided tenure-track librarian jobs because I didn’t want people telling me that I had to write library literature or get fired. When I write, I write because I want to, and I write what I please. I’ve thwarted tyrants and fomented rebellions to make sure people don’t impose conventional or trendy nonsense on me. I’ve fought hard for things I believe in and fought just as hard against things I don’t believe in. When left alone, I leave alone. When pushed, I push back.

This isn’t to say I’m a sociopath or a rebel. If I believe rules and conventions are good, I follow them. One of the things I like about working in academia is that I believe in the mission of higher education and of the libraries that support teaching and research. I never have the thoughts I’m starting to notice in some friends as we approach middle age, that maybe what I’m doing isn’t worthwhile. I think it’s worthwhile work, and if I didn’t think so I’d do something else. I do what I do because I believe it’s worth doing, not because social convention tells me it’s what I should do. Living in the world without compromising (another bit from Zhuangzi) isn’t a matter of fighting everything the world has to offer. It’s about finding the place in the world where you feel most comfortable, adapting the world as you can, and letting the rest go.

I’ve gone my own way and followed my own interests with little regard for what others think I should do for my entire life. And you know what? It’s worked out pretty well for me, even by the conventional worldly standards that I don’t care that much about. I’m healthy and happy. I have a loving family. I have a great job that I like a lot and that I’m pretty good at. I have good friends and good colleagues. I continue to learn, grow, and develop in ways that I enjoy and that benefit other people. I look around, see what I think is worth doing, give it a try, and then continue or not as I see fit. And I think that whatever conventional success I have achieved has a lot to do with how I’ve lived my life. I was never a grade grubber or a self promoter or a status seeker.  I don’t deliberately seek the approval of others, but I’ve found that if I do what I think is right and appropriate as the situation arises and try to do it well, the approval often comes. Wandering free and easy has led me to many good places, and I’m unlikely to give it up now.

That’s why I ignore anyone or any group that tries to define me or what it is that I do, or to tell me against my better judgment that I really should be doing what they think is important instead of what I think is important. I’m happy to learn from anyone willing to teach, but I  ignore anyone trying to preach. And I decide who’s worth learning from and what’s worth learning. The preachers don’t work my job or live my life. There’s no way they can know what I need to know better than I do myself.

If I were a guru or sherpa, which I assuredly am not, I’d tell you that you should live your life this way, too. It’s psychologically freeing. A lot of the stuff that people fear or fret about or get upset over don’t bother me at all. As Groucho Marx says, they roll off me like a duck. If other people do things differently than I do, that’s fine with me. However, it’s not up to me to tell other people how to live their lives or do their jobs. Live as you please, work as you like, preach all you want. Just try not to be to upset when I don’t follow you, think like you think, or do as you do. I’ll do the same.

In response to my last post, someone asked me “what are the basic skills that all librarians should have, if any?” There are several possible responses to that. The evasive response would be that if library schools can’t seem to figure out that question, the I certainly won’t be able to do so. However, I find that I can’t answer the question as it’s phrased because it needs more clarification. The phrase “basic skills” is deceptively simple, yet I think it can cover at least two different meanings which both determine how one might respond and lead to confusion and disagreement where perhaps none exists. Both basic and skills need some clarification. So here goes.

Basic in the phrase “basic skills of all librarians” can mean either 1) a basic set of skills that all librarians should have, or 2) a set of skills that all librarians should have at a basic level. I might disagree with either interpretation, although I agree with Lane Wilkinson’s argument in response to my last post that there are probably sets of skills that all libraries should have available. Though I might disagree with either interpretation, I’m more open to the second interpretation, which means we have to define what we mean by skills.

As with basic, there are at least two different meanings of skills at play here, a hard sense and a soft sense. In the hard sense, to have a skill means to be able to do something, it means knowing how and not just knowing that. In the soft sense, it means something more like knowing that, or knowing a bit about, or even being aware of. For example, let’s take a skill common in and essential to academic libraries: cataloging. To have cataloging skill in the hard sense, one must be able to catalog materials with some proficiency and efficiency. Cataloging in the hard sense is a skill developed over time and presumably improved over time. Cataloging as a skill in the soft sense means something like knowing how catalogs work, being aware of minimal cataloging standards, or something along those lines. It’s the kind of knowledge of cataloging that, say, reference librarians would need to get the most of of searching OPACs.

We can also interpret coding as a skill in a hard or soft sense. By coding as a skill, we can mean that the person is fully capable of efficiently and proficiently writing code to develop some digital object, OR we can mean that the person is aware of the basics of coding. For example, I couldn’t just sit down and start writing code of any kind. However, I know how code works and generally what it does. My last post mentioned html, and I know a bit of that as well. Just yesterday I had to go into the html of a website I was making and adjust the html because there were some problems with the margins that the editor wasn’t fixing right. I couldn’t write it, but I knew what to look for, I spotted the problem, and I fixed it. Does that mean I have “skill”? I usually interpret skill in the hard sense, so I’d say no. I do a lot of things well. That’s not one of them. Someone totally unfamiliar with how any code or markup language works might say yes.

With these distinctions in mind, let’s break “basic skills of all librarians” into two phrases: 1)  Basic Set of Skills of All Librarians, and 2) Basic Skills of All Librarians. Let’s interpret the first phrase in the hard sense, that is, a basic set of skills (in the hard sense) that all librarians should have. This means that all librarians should have these skills, and they can actually employ them usefully, efficiently, and proficiently. Let’s interpret the second phrase in the softer sense, meaning that there are some number of things that all librarians should have at least a basic minimal knowledge about. As for coding, personally I don’t have skill in the first sense, but I do in the second.

We can apply these distinction to the initial question. Now, are we asking (in my terms) “What basic set of skills should all librarians have?” in the hard sense, or are we asking “What are some basic-level skills of all librarian?” in the soft sense? Our answers might still differ, but at least we’re clearer on what we’re talking about.

Answering the first question, I’d have to say “none.” I can’t think of any library-specific skills (in the hard sense) that all librarians should have, while again agreeing that there are skills that all libraries should probably have. No library operates on this principle, and the larger the library the more specialized the skills get. In smaller libraries, librarians might need minimal proficiency in a larger number of skills, but no one will achieve complete proficiency (skill in the hard sense) in everything necessary to run a library. There’s neither the time nor the necessity. If that’s what people mean when they say “every librarian needs to learn coding,” then it’s very easy to point out the fact that every library in existence gets on without all the librarians having this skill (in the hard sense).

If instead we’re asking “what are some skills or knowledges that librarians should have or be aware of in at least a minimal sense?”, then my answer might change. I would still be very reluctant to claim that there were too many skills in the soft sense that all librarians should have. The world of librarianship is too complicated and diverse for there to be many. I might include things like knowing how catalogs and databases work, understanding the role of libraries in the support of students and faculty, or some other very general things. Regardless, it’s this second question that I think is the most useful one to discuss. Coding might be a good candidate for inclusion in that list, but only if we’re clear on what we mean by basic, skills, and even coding. I’d still say no, but I’m much more likely to be persuaded by others if this is the sense we mean.