Caveat Lector

Yesterday I started my workday on one of MPOW’s other campuses, owing to a meeting with someone who wanted library-related information about a new project. (I am, as usual, being deliberately vague, because I don’t know how much information should be let roam free at this point.)

The meeting turned out to be an object lesson in the deceptions of linguistic register. From the emails sent me by the man I was to meet, I envisioned a formal, middle-aged professorial sort. The man I met was a smart, fresh-faced, enthusiastic youngster. I figure I’ve got ten or twelve years on him. Age and wiles, you know?

But I remember writing over-formal emails to my elders at his age. Hell, I still do it, if I’m scared enough. It turned out to be a fun, relaxed meeting about an extremely cool project that I think has good chances for success. If I helped it along, I’m happy.

It does give one to wonder, though, what he thought he’d be meeting. Probably not an ugly awkward elephant of a woman with a ridiculously deep voice and puppy-doggish enthusiasm about ’most everything. Somehow that’s not what people expect.

A blogger friend of mine confessed that she’d been afraid of meeting me; she’d magnified me into some kind of unholy fusion of Dorothy Parker and a buzz saw. (Dorothy Parker? In what bizarro universe?) I can’t imagine being afraid of meeting me. Does not compute. I’m so incredibly harmless that if I were any more harmless harm would stick to me like the opposite pole of a magnet. I’m just that harmless.

But… okay… if all somebody knows of me is the pigheaded rants on CavLec… I guess I can understand a dash of apprehension. Who wants to meet somebody capable of nothing but pigheaded rants?

I don’t think I was quite so much the pigheaded ranter when I was younger. Not, well, pigheaded enough. I daresay that I occasionally gave people the same turn that young man gave me, though; if nothing else about me is formidable, my vocabulary is, and always has been.

Eh, well. There are worse fates for him than to grow into someone like me, I will make bold to say. I may be turning into an old jade (thirty-four on Friday!), but I’m not turning jaded, and that’s what counts.

I completely ran out of verbs today. Couldn’t come up with a one. Other than “to be,” that is, and my high-school English teachers beat into me with sticks that too much “to be” is a bad thing.

I hate formal writing like poison. When will I get this bloody chapter done?!

On the plus side, one door shut and another opened—the last feeler I got for a command performance fizzled out yesterday, but I got another nibble today. Aside from writing, life is good, even at the brink of 34-dom.

When I got off the bus yesterday, I met David coming back to the apartment. “What are you doing out in the hot-hot?” I asked.

He looked abashed. “Buying things,” he said. “Um, things you don’t know about… okay?”

“Okay,” I said cheerfully, knowing how these things go.

“I think you’ve had a cake every year, even if it was only a store-bought one,” he mused as we came up to the door of our building.

“I don’t mind store-bought ones,” I reassured him. “Especially when it’s this hot.”

“Well, I don’t care if it’s hot,” he said stubbornly. Ah. Homemade cake, then. He’s so cute.

Something there is that does not love a 34-year-old librarian, because a half-hour after my birthday started an epic thunderstorm woke me up. What terrible upheaval this presages I know not—but I’ll manage one way or another.

In the meantime, the Goths are playing with the string of my birthday balloon. We shall have to get them balloons of their own when it’s their birthday.

I took the day off from work in hopes of hitting a few museums downtown, or perhaps the zoo, but since the sudden transfer of the Pantanal to the eastern seaboard created a tremendous transit mess in DC today, better I should stay home and pontificate a bit.

I’ve been thinking about my adventures with whuffie. I don’t have as much as I once did, which in itself is a lesson: whuffie is context-dependent, and if the context disintegrates, you can’t always transfer its whuffie to another context. Nobody in libraryland actually cares that I used to be a content and standards developer for ebooks. That’s just the way it goes, with whuffie. Clinging to stale, outdated whuffie only makes you look outdated (and dumb enough to be unaware of it) yourself.

You can also outgrow old whuffie. I took a freelance job that was offered me based on my old ebook whuffie; I said “no” to it several times because that just wasn’t where my heart was any more… but finally I said yes (being nervous about the whole no-job-yet thing), and I shouldn’t have, and it hasn’t worked out well for reasons having nothing to do with them and everything to do with me. The last few pieces of the experience have been so disheartening that I have an invoice for them that’s been hanging fire for months because I don’t have the cojones to send it.

A lesson I should have learned faster than I did is that while being sought out for your whuffie is nifty and flattering, it isn’t always salubrious. I shouldn’t have taken the job Steve Potash offered me; it was offered solely on the basis of my ebook whuffie. Steve didn’t have any plans for me—he didn’t even really know me—and I didn’t have any (practicable) plans for OverDrive. While the whole trainwreck had a lot less to do with Steve than with my inability to cope productively with the horrendously vicious micromanager he had running his conversion department, it wouldn’t have happened at all if I’d been smarter.

So I’m telling you: when you get a neat offer, find out why it’s been offered. Secondhand whuffie, the “I’ve heard of you!” syndrome, is insufficient reason to accept, even (perhaps especially) if you’re desperate. Mismatched expectations (on both sides) make huge messes.

To make that concrete—I’m cool when somebody says “I’ve been reading CavLec for ages, and love it!” Anybody who can read CavLec for years and still like me pretty much has to be my kind of person. No comment on whether my kind of person is a good person or a bad person—you’ll assuredly find folks who’ll take either side of that question. But my kind of person isn’t likely to be shocked rigid at sight of me, or put off by my general style, or wholly unaware of my take on things. My kind of person and I are likely to get along famously and do good things for each other.

“You were recommended to me by X,” however, needs a little work. Did this person actually check me out? What does s/he actually know about me? Is s/he just looking for a warm body with basic articulatory skills? (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing in whuffie-driven academic librarianship; I just like to know first.) Fundamentally, am I there because I know something, or because my name supposedly lends lustre? I distrust the latter motivation. Your mileage may vary.

One positive about academic conferences is that the review process dilutes the role of whuffie in the system. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to have a big name when you’re submitting a paper proposal—but it doesn’t count for everything, either. A good paper by a relative nobody can and does get heard.

In a way it’s rather nice to be starting over again on the whuffie scale. I can be reasonably certain that such offers as I get these days are genuine, and the friends I am making in the profession will be my friends a long time. I do have a couple-three friends from ebook days still, but a lot of those relationships, I now see, were superficial at best.

So be careful of whuffie. It occasionally bites.

My husband knows what to get for his geeky wife. Full first season of Babylon 5 on DVD, squee!

“How’d you know I wanted that?” I asked him.

He laid a finger beside his nose. “Psi-Corps training,” he said.

Heh. That’s my man, that is.

Karen G. Schneider asks two provocative questions:

• Provocative questions #1: are women less willing to do what it takes to get to a conference, get recognized, get published? As a group, are we shy about being Shameless Hussies?
• Provocative questions #2: are they-what-does-the-pickin’ less likely to recognize women for their ability to contribute to current issues? Is the bar set higher for women? (Note how I didn’t single out one gender here.)

I tell y’all what, I never expected to apply these two CavLec categories to the same post. Going into a woman-dominated profession, woo-hoo! Surely that’s an escape from the tech-boy locker room!

Yeah. Not so much.

It doesn’t help to be in a profession with a deep-rooted distrust of technology, to begin with. Like it or not, this profession attracts a lot of technophobes, and they tend to be pretty shrill about it, and they’re not unlikely to be in positions of power (hello, Mr. G-rm-n). A friend of mine at JCDL who came to librarianship from IT had an appallingly hard time finding work. She’s smart, capable, and trained, so what happened? Distrust, if you ask me. Technogeeks aren’t real librarians, don’t you know; we’re there to be targets for the aggro that everyone else displaces from the machines on their desks.

I’ve seen the weirdest and silliest jealousy from professional colleagues (not all female, I should say). I told the thirty-second version of my career story (”crapped out of grad school, worked in e-publishing and typesetting for a while, went to library school, am a librarian”) to some professional colleagues some time ago. “Going to library school? Not your smartest decision ever,” said one frankly.

Maybe not. But I knew what I was getting into, and I chose it, and for me it was the right choice. I didn’t say that, because I didn’t feel right questioning what my colleague felt about the field. I just said “Too late now,” and shrugged off the idea advanced by another colleague that I could have had a much more lucrative career in IT. (The hell I could. Non-IT people have very strange notions about what it takes to have an IT career—beating things with rocks doesn’t cut it, folks—not to mention how much an IT career actually pays these days.)

So there isn’t just a glass ceiling in librarianship (and there is a well-documented glass ceiling; this profession is majority female, but its administrators are majority male). There’s a glass wall, between women and systems librarianship. Subtle and not-so-subtle peer pressure telling us that them geeks, they’re Not Us.

Yeah, and how ’bout those geek guys, huh? Huh?

I’m going to pick on #code4lib, because there’s some vague hope they’ll forgive me. I’m not picking on them because they’re bad people. I’m picking on them because I think the story is illustrative of some dark corners in tech librarianship. #code4lib is an IRC channel for people who do things with computer code in libraries. It isn’t all MLS-holding librarians; it includes some straight-up coders sans MLS. It isn’t all men, either, though I can count female regulars (on the channel, at any rate; the affiliated mailing list has more female participation) on one hand.

So the #code4libbers decided ’round about last November or December or thereabouts that they were going to whomp up a little ol’ conference for themselves. In February. It happened, and the organizers were all very proud of themselves. Approximate ratio of men to women attendees, last I heard, was eight or nine to one. For a tech conference, not so bad, believe it or not. For a librarian conference, abysmal.

It doesn’t take active malice to marginalize women; simple thoughtlessness is often enough. I hope and believe spur-of-the-moment con organization isn’t widespread practice, because it’s a practice that excludes women. Like it or not, women generally have more household responsibilities than men, and are significantly less able to drop everything for a spur-of-the-moment con. (I can, mind you, but I’m childfree. My husband is more than competent to take care of himself and the Goths.) Librarianship can’t fix what goes on in librarians’ homes, but librarianship can and should work around it. That means plenty of notice for cons.

But hey, it gets better. I have the chat transcript for the episode I’m about to recount, though I don’t mean to share it unless I am accused of lying. (Which has been known to happen to other bloggers in similar circumstances.)

In the course of conference planning, a thoughtlessly sexist joke headline went up on the conference web page. It was called to the attention of a male code4libber by his female boss. He came to the IRC channel to complain, and to do him credit, he was honestly unhappy for reasons other than having been embarrassed in front of her.

He was stonewalled. Pushed back at, hard. “So what, they aren’t letting you go anyway.” (I couldn’t make that one up if I tried.) “I think it’s in how you look at it.” (Um, yeah.) “I don’t think personally it is that extreme.” (Someone’s boss did. But she’s a woman, so, um, what, she doesn’t count?) “Umm, are you on drugs, dude?” (Again with the I couldn’t make this up.)

And I was there for the whole thing, and I spoke up briefly in support of the guy complaining, and nobody paid me two hoots’ worth of attention. The headline was, however, changed. Under protest.

So that’s what we deal with, you know what I’m saying? I left code4lib not long after that. I had a long, angry CavLec post all ready for the ether, but I held it until after the con because my loyalties were divided—hell yeah I am a feminist, and hell yeah I will say so; but I am also a library technologist, and I thought that con was an important step, and I wanted to see it succeed. I was torn.

My absence was noticed. People emailed me about it. I was pretty frank. Eventually, I was enticed back, and for the most part, people have cut out the crap (that being hardly the first instance of random sexist stupidity I’d witnessed there). So the post’s sat in my draft queue ever since. Trust me, this version? Is highly condensed and bowdlerized.

Yeah. So my answer to Karen’s question one is: hell yes we are unwilling to put up with this garbage if it’s the price of visibility. And that’s our problem? I think not. We need to move the focus off women’s behavior (which is generally damn logical and reasonable, you ask me) and onto the environments that women are not finding congenial.

I am not a shameless hussy. I damn well shouldn’t have to be, either.

Question two is a good one, and thanks to Karen for asking it and to Jane for seconding it louder than a whisper. Rather than answer it, I’d rather focus on what we can do about it. Call it a good old-fashioned consciousness-raising.

I’m on the programming committee for the next code4libcon. First thing on the to-do list was lining up potential keynoters. So what’d I do? I stacked the deck, hell yes I did—of thirteen candidates, seven are women. Did it work? Of the current top three vote-getters, one is a woman (and yeah, she was one of my nominees). We’re looking at two, maybe three keynotes, so the odds look good.

We can stack the odds. If we care, we have to, because damn straight these geek guys aren’t gonna do it for us. If you’re shy, you don’t even have to put yourself forward. We can talk each other up. We should. And we need to resist every temptation to cut each other down; “united we stand” and all that fun stuff.

The other thing we need to do is get over this “I’m not techie enough!” fixation that a lot of us have (and yeah, I’m prone to it too). One of my good friends won’t go anywhere near #code4lib—not because I’ve complained about the atmosphere, but because “I’m not techie enough.” C’mon. Techies are just people. Just librarians, some of ’em. If we don’t knock the rough edges off ’em, who’s going to? If we don’t learn from them, where will we learn? If we don’t join them, who will?

So. There’s my story, and there are my thoughts, and there are my recommendations. How about yours?