Meeting of the mind
Michael Edmonds of the Wisconsin Historical Society taught me a grounded, ethics-minded, useful “introduction to libraries” class a couple years ago. One of the first things he addressed was the demographics of librarianship.
No surprises. We’re pasty-faced white. We’re women. We’re heinously educated. We’re pretty well-off. (And yes, I resemble all those remarks.) And—we’re managers, especially once we get a few years’ experience under our belts.
Oh.
I don’t think mine was the only face that fell. I don’t quite recall, though.
I am not cut out to manage. I’m just not. That doesn’t mean I’m incapable of it; it just means I have to learn how owing to lack of native talent. I’ve had both negative and positive examples in what for lack of a better word I will call my career, so with any luck at all I’ll be able to avoid the worst excesses of my bad bosses while remembering what made my good ones good.
And I could have worse opportunities to dip my toes in the water. This is a time-limited (very!) task force with a relatively clear mission (as these things go) and good spadework already accomplished. I’ve one person on the group who is an unabashed me-backer, and the rest are at worst neutral toward me. I’d really actively have to screw this one up to fail, and I shall endeavor not to.
In that spirit, the list of meeting-management links sent me by the LazyWeb (thanks, Norm, Alice, Greg, Chris, Joy, Elaine, and Steve):