Category: Library Issues

I was going to comment on Jenny’s post concerning the ALA and conference fees, but my thoughts seem irrelevant in the face of Meredith’s incredible post. Excerpts below, with small amounts of commentary:

Librarians sacrifice enough by being librarians (and getting paid so little) that it’s not their duty to serve the ALA. Librarians should help their patrons. They shouldn’t have to make little money and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice their financial well-being or the well-being of their family so that they can speak at a stupid conference.

Bravo! There’s not a single librarian that couldn’t be making more money in another profession, and I’d be willing to say that goes triple for those of us on the tech edge of the world. We’ve make individual choices to come to this profession, and we shouldn’t have to further our financial burden in order to share the knowledge we bring to it.

In the past, there were certain ways that librarians contributed to the profession. They wrote articles for professional journals, they served on committees for professional organizations, and/or they spoke at conferences. The first option involves research and time. The latter two involve travel, expense, and time. Is that the only way to contribute to the profession these days?

Here’s a topic near and dear to my heart. As a new academic librarian, I have things like tenure and reappointment to worry about, and “what counts” is a huge deal. Does my blogging count towards “forwarding the profession”? I’d like to think so, but I’d be willing to bet that my committee might not feel that way.

They spend more than $25 million on payroll and operating expenses alone! And I would feel really good about that if I thought that the ALA was doing a lot of good. But I don’t see it. And I certainly don’t see them representing a younger generation of members. When there is talk of a shortage of librarians rather than a shortage of entry-level jobs (which is the reality), new librarians feel betrayed. When the ALA is so behind technologically and its President insults basically anyone interested in any sort of online publishing, digitization, or Web design, techies feel betrayed. When the ALA doesn’t lobby for better pay for librarians, those of us who barely make ends meet feel betrayed. What does ALA stand for? Who do they help? It is an organization that represents libraries, not librarians.

Why do we need the ALA? Is ALA really relevant anymore? Does anyone really feel like ALA represents their interests? At my job, none of my colleagues has been to an ALA Conference and have no interest in going. They seem to consider the ALA pretty irrelevant. And that perspective is only confirmed when the only thing the ALA Council can seem to accomplish is passing a resolution on Iraq!!! The ALA is a huge organization that is hard to understand, hard to feel a part of, and hard to know what it stands for. I paid out-of-pocket for my membership this year, but it will certainly be the last unless the ALA changes. But they won’t.

This again has been rattling around in my head for some time. I re-upped my ALA membership recently, in the belief that making change happens more easily from the inside. But I can see a time when that membership letter comes, and I decide that my $150 is better spent on me than on the nebulous ALA. It’s clear that the ALA needs to change, especially in the face of an upcoming generation of librarians who are largely questioning of their purpose and direction. When the older generation leaves the profession, where will the ALA be then?

No, the world is not ending, I simply was convinced by kgs’s recent post. I expected to find the article she quoted from and rant again about Gorman’s lack of technological understanding.

Instead, I’m going to agree with him.

On one, very small point. And probably not in the manner he’d like.

In an article in the San Fransisco Chronicle, Gorman is quoted as follows:

“If you look at the Encyclopedia Britannica, you can be fairly sure that somebody writing an article is an acknowledged expert in that field, and you can take his or her words as being at least a scholarly point of view,” said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and dean of library services at Cal State Fresno. “The problem with an online encyclopedia created by anybody is that you have no idea whether you are reading an established person in the field or somebody with an ax to grind. For all I know, Wikipedia may contain articles of great scholarly value. The question is, how do you choose between those and the other kind?”

Gorman thinks the answer for academia lies in encouraging students to think critically. “Anyone involved in higher education will tell you one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance (by students) of anything that’s online,” he said.

It’s that last line that I agree with, but I’d like to make an addendum. I’d prefer to say “Anyone involved….will tell you that one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance.”

Period.

What I want to know is: why should we be teaching our students to blindly accept anything? When we’ve had example after example after example of print sources being spurious, why should we not be teaching students to verify their research no matter what the source. That’s certainly what I’m teaching…verification is evaluation as it relates to information. Blind trust of any source is a problem.

Some really excellent blogging from Jenny over atTheShiftedLibrarian on the Gaming, Learning and Libraries conference.

More (since these people are all incredibly cool and are tagging like crazy) on technorati and flickr. Such a great topic! Here in my academic library, I’m not often jealous of public libraries. Here’s one opportunity for me to be so, since I don’t eeeeeeeeeever see us ordering games and game systems. I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Is anyone out there in library land leveraging Facebook for reference/instruction interactions?

Just curious…I’m trying, here at UTC, but have as yet had no students take advantage of it. I’ve created a Lupton Library group, and mentioned it in all my of classes over the last month or so, to try and get the word out. Given that it’s enormously popular, I had hopes that students might feel comfortable sending me messages via it, rather than email. I’m not giving up yet, but a month with nothing doesn’t exactly scream success to me. Fred, you’re the expert…have you seen anyone using it in this way?

If you’re on, feel free to look me up and friend me.

Just a quick note that in trying desperately to keep up with the ton of phenomenal writing going on in the biblioblogosphere, I somehow missed this post by Meredith that sums up some of the thoughts I’ve had about library systems departments.

I’ve wondered this myself…having gotten my degree in a department that emphasized both LS and IS, and had a significant number of opportunities to learn code, why more people with those skills aren’t recruited.

The sad fact of the matter is that it’s largely salary based. If you know PHP/MySQL/Java/AJAX stuff these days, you can make much, much, much more than any library is going to be able to offer you. I dabble in PHP/MySQL stuff, and I’m certain it was a large part of my being hired in my current position, even though I don’t directly deal with it on a day-to-day basis. But I also know that if I wanted to market myself in that way, my stock would jump quite a bit. I’m happy being a librarian, but it’s hard for a new programmer to look at $30K vs $80K and choose the $30K.

With that said…if I were a library director, I’d be scrambling like crazy for funds to hire a full time programmer. The amount of benefit there would so far outweigh the salary needs that I can’t even describe it.

EDIT: Turns out Jenny said a little something about this the other day as well.

This is a response that I sent out on LITA-l, but felt needed archiving here on the blog.

Originally written by Anita S. Coleman on Wed, 30 Nov 2005 on Lita-l:

The point is that blogs simply and plainly ARE NOT scholarly communications. They may be communication pieces, tools, etc. written or produced by scholars, but they are not scholarly communications. Just as non-peer-reviewed articles in trade magazines, newsletters, popular and general interest periodicals are not part of the body of literature regarded as scholarly articles, and are not weighted for tenure and promotion as do the “traditional” scholarly peer-reviewed literature.

“Simply and plainly”? They may not be of a form traditionally considered scholarly…does this mean they are intrinsically not so? Or that they could not become such?

Sitting aside the traditional view of scholarly information sources (see my views on that here), is there a better method of review than open publication and comment? Can anyone intelligently argue that allowing anyone to comment on your paper is worse than the current “insider only” method of scholarly publication?

There’s a lot of baggage tied up in academia’s love affair with the vetting of information sources…issues of authority, issues of access, issues of relevance…but with the current moving us towards individual or university self-archiving and the web taking publishing out of the hands of the few and into the hands of the many, we’re overdue for a shift in the academic publishing paradigm. So yes, I have to say…I think that blogging SHOULD be taken into account for issues of tenure and promotion. I think that any production of knowledge is a valuable one.

So there appears to be lots of talk among the biblioblogosphere about Library 2.0, a takeoff on Web 2.0. I’m a huge proponent here…but I think maybe we have a marketing problem hiding under the digital shine.

I get Web 2.0. We’re talking less one way and more two way, less top and more bottom, less central and more distributed, less professional and more amateur, less yahoo and more google, less page and more blog, less html and more xml. I get it, and I’ve been talking it up for a few years now.

What I don’t necessarily get is…how does this translate into library speak? I’ve talked about giving more power to the patron, allowing them to tag our OPACs and comment on our blogs. Over at ALA Techsource, they list a set of Library 2.0 principles:

1. The Library is everywhere.
2. The Library has no barriers.
3. The library invites participation.
4. The library uses flexible, best-of-breed systems.

With the exception of #4 above (where I simply wish it were the case), you could replace the phrase “The Library” with “Information” and get a much more robust series of statements, IMNSHO.

Information is everywhere.
Information has no barriers.
Information invites participation.

As librarians, our job is now to figure out how to make this information easily accessible by our patrons. We can do this by leveraging technology to make this information more easily found (Google Book Search), more easily organized (flickr) or more easily shared (del.icio.us). But we should remember that The Library != Information.

EDIT: Great set of Library 2.0 doubts and issues over at Ross’s blog. I share some of his snark.