Single spray and steady stream
Everybody has the work thing that makes them grit teeth and wish for an Uzi. Mine is “I don’t have time to learn all that!”
$DEITY, do I hear that one a lot. Sometimes it’s a piece of software. Sometimes it’s a genre of software (wikis are a particular target, I have found). Sometimes it’s open access, or the broader questions of scholarly communication. Whatever it is, it makes me look around and wonder just what the hell profession I landed in, anyhow. I thought we were all about the knowledge-seeking? Guess that’s just on behalf of patrons, though. Our own professional issues we’re allowed to be deliberately incurious about. Or something.
Right. Yeah. Take the Uzi away from me. Thank you. This really burns my britches.
My current hypothesis is that librarianship has two paradigms for picking up professional knowledge: the single spray and the steady stream. I am an unabashed steady-streamer. I read professional stuff every gosh-darn day, liblogs and techblogs and online journals and reports and conference rundowns and whathaveyou. I’m not indiscriminate; I can’t afford to be. Some people in my very own subfield I don’t read, often because they raise my blood pressure uselessly. Some reports I get to the end of the exec summary and chuck; not worth the effort. Sometimes stuff is so bad I can only go “WTF?” and move on. Even so. Every day. Every day I read something. Something.
My reading patterns aren’t perfect; most of “the literature” passes me right on by. I did slightly better when I was teaching last fall, because I held office hours in the SLIS library and was in close proximity to the new-print-journals shelf. I’d do better if more libsci journals offered TOC newsfeeds; I’ll go to some effort to dig up something interesting-looking once I know about it. Honestly, though, most of my lit-awareness lives in my Bloglines these days.
Still. Every day. Every day I read something.
I get the sense a lot of my colleagues prefer the single-spray method of learning. You go to a conference or a workshop or some other kind of meeting. You learn what’s being sprayed at you in concentrated bursts. You bring back what you learned. You do your job and let the world fly by because you’re too busy to read, until the next conference.
I suppose this must work out all right for them. I just cannot, cannot imagine functioning that way myself. I’d feel as though I’d suddenly lost my sight or hearing.
This pattern, if I have it right, may have implications for the spread of open-access awareness among academic librarians. If we’re going to hit the single-sprayers, we have to hit the ALAs and ACRLs and state library conferences good and hard. I am not volunteering for this duty, y’all; I’ve been to one ACRL, and one was a lifetime’s worth for me. My distaste for librarian zoos is downright visceral.
But somebody’s gotta do it.