Whuffie and achievement
I agreed to do the fantasy-authors book more or less purely because of the whuffie.
My draft is done and off to my co-author, and that makes me happy beyond all sense. I have a newfound admiration for John Clute; the man is a machine. I’m quite happy to leave the finicking job of writing reference books about specfic to him in future. Whew, it’s a lotta work.
But when you’re a brand-new librarian, uncomfortably aware that you’re going to be up for contract renewal in eighteen months (I barely dodged that bullet by the simple expedient of getting a different job) and publications count, no whuffie is bad whuffie, because you can’t really know where the next shot of whuffie is going to come from.
I’m not sorry I did the book. Aside from the brain-eating aspects of this last month, it was fun. Will I do another like it? Doubtful to the point of “are you kidding me? no way!”
I’m in a job now with very low whuffie requirements. Approaching zero. Seriously. If I come in and do my flippin’ job, that’s all anybody cares about. Oh, they don’t mind if I attract whuffie, as long as I don’t spend work time on it (seriously! this has been said to me! out loud! more than once!), but ’tain’t needful, except insofar as whuffie-ish sorts of things are in fact part of my job. (And they are. If you’re outreach for an initiative, you present. Part of the game.)
Add a few personality factors to that—professional writing is painfully hard for me (though I’m getting better at this book-reviewing wheeze), I don’t like travel anywhere near enough to do a lot of it, and I’m a bluntly poison-tongued peasant instead of graceful politic nobility—and the sum adds up to pretty limited whuffie-chasing.
Suits me fine.
One of the many differences between Meredith and me is that Meredith is a rock star and I’m not. Meredith, $DEITY love her, sometimes seems embarrassed about that, going out of her way to reassure me that I do, too, generate whuffie aplenty! But she doesn’t have to do that; I keep telling her so, and she keeps not listening to me. I don’t mind whuffie. I just don’t need a lot of it; the trickles I get are perfectly adequate for my modest purposes, and I don’t need to chase it, neither for job advancement nor for a sense of achievement, the way some librarians do.
Ah. Achievement. Now that is something I’m still chasing. Just not on the personal-whuffie level, is all.
I would do Five Weeks again in a heartbeat. It made work-life measurably better for forty librarians, and if you look at the aggregator page, you see that even more librarians are still finding value in it. I’m spearheading the ASIST Five Weeks poster because I want to see other people pick up that ball and run with it. (Plus, 90 minutes away, no airports, yay!) There’s no need for disenfranchised librarians; we proved that. That was and is an achievement, worth a lot more than personal whuffie.
I’ll talk about open access and scholarly communication whenever I have half a chance (in fact, I have to make myself stop doing it in social situations!). I want to see open access in its many forms take over the scholarly-communication world for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with me having my wagon hitched to it. It’s just the right thing, for academia and for the world outside it. In fact, if there’s one thing about my career so far that I’m mildly disappointed in, it’s that I haven’t been talking enough about OA, especially to librarians, who aren’t as clueful en masse as one could wish.
(If I could make OA as sexy a bandwagon as Library 2.0, I’d die a happy woman. I just have no idea how to even start doing that.)
Given the opportunity, which is admittedly fairly unlikely, I’ll also speak at tech or tech-librarian conferences. Female visibility in tech is a political-achievement issue for me; nobody’s surprised at that, right? I did turn down Top Tech Trends, but I knew when I did so that LITA had been clueful enough to invite other women (for which, bravo LITA!), and I also knew that those other women had picked up the ball. If they hadn’t… it would have been a much harder decision than it was.
There’s whuffie-less achievement, and achievement-less whuffie, as well as the ideal of whuffie and achievement going hand-in-hand. I think we can all come up with examples of all three in librarianship; I needn’t elaborate. The good thing about where I am and what I’m doing is that I have no reason whatever to chase whuffie that doesn’t also represent real achievement in my mind.
I like that. It suits me well. Means I’ll never be a rock star like Meredith—but I didn’t get into this business for its rock-star potential in the first place.