Caveat Lector

Check out the sidebar! It is stylin’, with the new Creative Commons Zero license! That does mean that this design, such as it is, is gankable as well—it’s mine, I did it up from scratch, so it isn’t immediately derivative of anybody else’s. I’m boggled that anyone would want to gank it, because I am so not a design talent, but I’ve seen it written up a few places as an example of good (or at least unusual and interesting) design, so what the hell.

I am hard at work on a little movie for MPOW, to be shown at an arts-and-humanities symposium in (yikes yikes yikes!) two weeks (yikes!). This turns out to be surprisingly simple and even enjoyable, given Keynote, Garage Band, a video camera, a digital audio recorder, lots of neat pictures from MPOW’s collections, and a hell of a lot of time and elbow grease. I have yet to see whether Keynote’s QuickTime export works as advertised, but if it does, I will be a very happy camper.

Come to think of it… I should probably check that on Monday. You think?

Meredith wrote quite a thoughtful post about rockstardom and how to achieve it. This post of mine? Is probably going to be labeled “sour grapes.” Well, so be it. I think there’s more to the story.

I am not a rock star in librarianship. Meredith and I both have second master’s, graduated at the same time, got jobs at the same time, blogged about getting jobs at the same time, got interested in social software at the same time (well, okay, I started blogging first, but that’s irrelevant)—and she’s a rock star and I’m not. Let’s pick through that a moment.

First of all, everything in Meredith’s post is absolutely true. Fill a need. Be passionate. Spend your own time and money. Make it about something besides you. Grow some guts. Network. Don’t let geographic barriers bar you from the opportunities available via web contacts. Self-promote. Second of all, I don’t think Meredith and I are all that far apart in raw talent. (If you disagree, leave me to my happy illusions, please!) Third of all, I’ve done nearly everything Meredith mentions. (Including spend money, gah. Like water sometimes.) Nobody’s ever accused me of a lack of passion!

But for me, that didn’t turn out to be enough. Hmmmm.

Let’s be frank. Some of it is right-place-right-time-right-topic caprice. The spotlight hit wikis just as Meredith did. She didn’t plan that; she couldn’t have. Some people do try to plan it, try to make spotlights that they can then inhabit. Sometimes it even works… but honestly, I think rockstars are different from attention-mongers, and I definitely have an internal classifier; don’t you? As for me, institutional repositories don’t have a spotlight, and very likely never will. So I could make all the right moves (not that I have; just sayin’) and still never be a rockstar. Nota bene, this is not an argument about who “deserves” rockstardom, not least because I find such arguments virulently poisonous; it’s an argument about who gets it, and a plea to people not to beat themselves up if they don’t. Sometimes it’s really, truly not you.

Some of the rockstar machine is inextricably tied up with societal appearance norms that privilege certain looks over others. This is an unpopular thing for me to say, but so be it; it’s true. Meredith comes one hell of a lot closer to this society’s standard for attractiveness than I do. There’s a bloody good reason I keep pictures of myself off the web; it’s far better for me if the Internet doesn’t know I’m a dog. Again, this is not an argument about just deserts—well, okay, to some extent it is; appearance ought to be largely irrelevant, but it’s not, and that has some evil, evil knock-on effects. People of color don’t get a fair shake in this or any field, and yes, the markedness of their appearance compared to the white-bread norm is partly why. Women don’t get a fair shake in tech for similar reasons; we’re capital-D Different. What I’m saying is, if rockstardom is your goal, it’s worth thinking about where you are with regard to appearance. You can be plain, even as mud-fence ugly a woman as I am (note that ugly doesn’t matter as much for men as for women), and still do fine; it’s a disadvantage that may, however, disqualify you from actual rockstardom. Life isn’t fair.

Certain demeanor expectations also operate in the rockstar realm. Library rockstars are, logically enough, what we think librarians ought to be: genial, fun, optimistic, helpful, gregarious, pleasant people—but not too in-your-face about anything (again, especially for women; men have more leeway here), and certainly not deeply anti-establishment (for several possible values of “establishment”), because that’s intimidating. Think about the library rockstars you know, and see if I’m not mostly right. Now me, I violate these norms regularly onblog, on-mailing-list, and in my speaking and writing (Roach Motel was one gigantic exercise in norm violation in the IR subfield; it shocked one of its reviewers!). I don’t see how there can be any doubt in this world that it’s made me an unlikely candidate for rockstardom.

I’m not alone. I have good friends in librarianship who are just that leetle bit too iconoclastic to be rockstars; I adduce Bob “boats against the current” Molyneux as a good example, since he’s gone more or less public about it. They find their places, most of them, as I’ve found mine; sometimes very high places (you know who you are, person I have in mind!). More power to ’em; sometimes a damn good hole-poking skeptic is worth a dozen rockstars. But sometimes they chafe. Sometimes I chafe. Rockstars tend to keep their chafing to themselves, or to a tight circle of friends. Not an absolute rule, just a tendency.

Ah, me. Discouraging the young again. I should be ashamed, I suppose.

Look, folks, rockstardom isn’t the only face of success. In spite of my bulldog’s face, in spite of my snark, in spite of everything, I am quite as successful as I need or want to be. I found work in my heart’s home. When I need to say something serious about what I do, I can get it said and hearkened to, here or even (to my own surprise) in The Literature. (I could do considerably more, even, if I were a more fluent writer than I am.) In spite of the people I’ve alienated (and they are not few), I have my own network of well-loved colleagues and friends; I’ve never been lonely in this marvelous profession. If rockstardom got dumped in my lap, I’m honestly not entirely sure what I would do, but I lean toward “running and hiding,” because I have serious being-around-hordes and travel-hassle limits, and rockstardom would stomp all over them.

(I have an evil brain. It is now projecting images of 1984’s Room 101, with me shackled to the chair and rockstardom lurking and lashing its tail behind the little grate, with me screaming, “Do it to Sarah! Not me! Sarah!” Yeah. Evil. Um, sorry, Sarah.)

Most of all, I have the luxury of defining success for myself. I fully and freely acknowledge that non-tenure-track academic librarianship has its discontents, but they pale to insignificance beside the phenomenal freedom of picking my own goalposts. Rockstardom, even in easygoing librarianship, has been known to turn into the Russian’s plaint in Chess:

Now I’m where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven’t won at all!
Running for my life and never looking back in case there’s someone right behind to shoot me down and say he always knew I’d fall.

No, thanks. That’s not a life I’d even want to risk having. See my sidebar! And think good and hard about your own goalposts, please, before you set your sights on rockstardom.

Several kindly librarians of my acquaintance tried to convince me yesterday that indeed I am a rockstar. Evidence clearly shows otherwise, but thanks to them anyway.

One told me (paraphrased), “I wouldn’t know anything much about open access if not for you.”

Y’know, I said academic librarians were largely ignorant of OA in Roach Motel, and I got some pushback on that. I’d like the pushers-back to kindly buy me a drink now. Yeah, yeah, you’re not ignorant, sure. I challenge you to find five others at YPOW not directly working with an institutional repository or OA publishing program who aren’t. Just five. I’m guessing that if you can even do it, it’ll take work.

Trailblazing. Bah. It is for the birds.

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.

We had a lovely presentation at MPOW today, by a well-known academic in the messy intersection of science and education, about a new open-access journal he’s helping launch. The presentation has been advertised for a week, sent out to the big library listserv at MPOW at least twice, and put up on the daily events calendar at the main library.

Fewer than ten librarians attended.

Just a datapoint. If I say any more I’ll dunk myself in the soup.

I inadvertently let the textartisan.com domain expire. I’ve renewed it, but until DNS catches up, my regular email address is nicely hosed. If it has to get to me, use dorothea dot salo at gmail dot com.

Yeah, don’t start, okay? It’s been a bad week.

Michael Stephens started it, and I’d hate to miss a chance to evangelize the awesomeness of Flickr’s wealth of Creative Commons material, so:

Image ganked from here, and found via the slick and useful Flickr Storm search engine.

Nothing particularly gnomic about this utterance, so I won’t insult intelligences by explaining it; I’ll just point and shut up.

By the end of next week, I’ll have another beating-things-with-rocks project to show all y’all. I’m quite proud of it.

So y’all remember what was making me cranky a year ago? Proof’s in the pudding, and the author copies are in my hot little hands:

Now my mom can quit bugging me to go write a book already. Okay, okay, so I really only wrote slightly less than half of one. My name is on the cover. Dayenu.

This book is what you buy if you have K-12 (or maybe even undergraduate) students who would like to write book reports on an author they might, you know, actually like. There are also some readers-advisory bits that I think came out pretty well (and I say this having opposed some of them pretty strenuously at the time): if-you-liked pullouts on some authors and subgenre listings in back. It’s a pretty good mix of authors if I do say so myself; we pulled off a couple of fairly daring tricks, such as including three or four graphic-novel authors as well as several YA authors, and openly acknowledging the female half of male-female writing partnerships. (Yes, I know, the latter shouldn’t be daring, but find me another reference book that does it properly, I dare you.)

If I had it to do over, I’d make much more of a point of expanding coverage of writers of color, who regularly get shafted in what turns into a self-reinforcing cycle: they don’t get read because readers-advisory books don’t include them, and then readers-advisory books don’t include them because their readerships aren’t large. I did make a total pest of myself to keep a couple-three excellent, less-known-than-they-oughta-be writers of color in our readalike lists, and I’m not sorry about that at all, just sorry it had to come to that.

But for now—Jen’s and my book, let me show you it.