I don’t have any friends at Iowa and so I don’t know what happened behind closed doors, let me just say that much up-front. I seriously doubt, however, that the library had as big a role in this as is being portrayed. I’m sorry, I just cannot credit that Iowa librarians (librarians!?) would have done that little homework on that major a policy shift. I went to a whole ETD conference and did a whacking lot of searching in the literature (plus consulting with one of the top names in ETDs) before anybody trusted me to help with MfPOW’s ETD policy!

I can credit without an iota of difficulty that the Graduate School walked into ETDs completely unprepared and then blamed it on the library, because I’ve seen more than one graduate administration that didn’t give a flying flip about its students, and plenty of clueless, blame-shifting faculty who pick any handy target when they’re caught out.

I could admittedly be wrong about this. I don’t think I am. And if I’m not, I think the library should be apoplectic at the way the Graduate School shoved it into the line of fire. “I want a new building in the next capital budget or I blow your lame-o coverup to the skies” apoplectic.

Anyway. ETD policies. It’s stupid and irresponsible not to offer an embargo period. One to two years is the norm last I checked, and I believe it sufficient; a few places offer indefinite embargo, but I honestly don’t think it necessary to pander to egos quite that far. (If you haven’t sold it, contracted to publish it, or patented it in two years, it ain’t gonna happen.)

Of course the institution doesn’t take over the student’s copyright. (I hear weird, vague, and unconfirmed reports that the University of Michigan actually does this. If it does, it shouldn’t.) A non-exclusive license to hold, preserve, and make available is all that’s necessary.

Iowa screwed up big-time. Do not do likewise. That’s pretty much all I can find to say.

That’s just the reality of a profession with several specializations. You learn the basics of things you’ll never actually do. Nothing wrong with it at all, and no ideology about “the core of the profession” required to justify it. “This is something librarians do” is enough.

When I was in library school, I was not required to learn how to run a server. I was not required to learn how to evaluate software and hardware acquisitions. I was not required to learn about laws relating to library patrons and computers. I was not required to learn about digitization. I was not required to so much as learn how to create a web page, never mind learning to program!

Presumably these aren’t things librarians do. I do them. Presumably I’m not a librarian?

Librarianship has created an immense Somebody Else’s Problem field around computers. Unlike reference work, unlike cataloguing, unlike management, systems is all too often not considered a librarian specialization. It is therefore not taught at a basic level in some library schools, not offered as a clear specialization track, and not recruited for as it needs to be. And it is not often addressed in a systematic fashion by continuing-education programs in librarianship.

This situation is no longer tenable, if indeed it ever was.

A couple of things bring this to the front of my cortex at the moment. One is the deprofessionalization of several librarians in northern Wisconsin. There are quite a few ways to think about this situation. One way I’m thinking about it is in terms of what goes on in library buildings losing its accustomed specializations without adding others. If the library is just a community center and book warehouse, no, I’m sorry, one doesn’t need a master’s degree to manage it. If the master’s-degreed folks can’t manage the same library’s online presence, as the Marathon County library director claims, well…

This situation isn’t just about librarians missing technology skills. A good friend of mine in another Wisconsin library hired a non-MLS for a technology position. She tells me that the clincher wasn’t technology skills—it was attitude, specifically public-service skills. All right, what? What is going on here? One thing may be that the mingled fear and fetishization of technology is breeding tech-savvy librarians who think their skills are a free pass. I’ve got news for you monkeys: nope. Doesn’t work that way. Hasn’t for me, won’t for you, can’t, and shouldn’t. But as long as library schools treat the tech-savvy like lusi naturae, this is how we can expect things to go.

(There’s more to this story, and I have another rant coming, but I need not to give any more specifics, as several someones are involved that I don’t wish to cause harm to.)

Another tidbit that’s come up lately is the report from the New Skills for a Digital Era archivists’ colloquium. Over and over again, the refrain, “it seems unreasonable to expect information professionals to have the skills of a professional programmer or systems administrator” (p. x et seq… et seq… et seq… and if you think I’m kidding about the et seq, read their report yourself).

Why? Why is this unreasonable? It’s not as though a whole lot can get done in a digital era without somebody to run the damn servers. Why isn’t running some damn servers considered a librarian skill?

Because it’s not a library-specific skill? Big whoop. Neither is hiring or event planning or budgeting or project management, and we damned well expect librarians to do those, because libraries rely on them to function. Libraries rely on systems as well. Why can I not add “QED” here and walk away?

Because we can’t teach skills in the two scant years we’ve got? Big whoop. Can’t teach all there is to know about the information landscape either; that’s never stopped us from graduating reference librarians. It’s always been more important to get out there with enough knowledge to get started and enough confidence and flexibility to learn on the job.

Because “professional” skills are too high a bar? Well, sure. The godly sysadmin I work with will be the first to tell you I’m not a professional sysadmin. Anybody who’s seen my code can tell you I’m not a professional programmer. Big whoop. I installed DSpace from scratch (with help) my first day in my first job. I taught DSpace customization less than a year later. If I can do what I do with next to no formal training, so can other people, if they’re not told they can’t and don’t have to anyway. When are we going to stop telling them that? When?

(My students sure as hell didn’t hear that from me, I’ll tell you that much.)

The perverse result of this situation is that our sysadmins are better paid than we are, never mind that IT folks are nibbling away our jobs at the margins. I let slip to the Godly Sysadmin what I’m paid. He was appalled. Why shouldn’t we be in the scrum getting what we’re worth? Or, if you’re a management-type, holding down library costs by replacing expensive IT-specific staff?

It is time and past we stopped drawing lines in the sand around computers. Doing so is unacceptably narrowing our profession and inviting others (including some of our own) to marginalize it and us. As happened in Marathon County. As continues to happen everywhere people wonder whether the library is relevant in the Google age. As continues to happen everywhere friends of mine tell me in IM:

Friend: I just don’t want to go to another place where I’m the token techie and they use me as an excuse to not learn things themselves
Friend: I can’t even imagine what it would be like to actually share ideas about online library services with colleagues
Friend: heaven on earth

There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening around digital tools and digital data. What I personally struggle with is external perception of librarians that simply presumes I am neither interested nor capable of being involved—and a profession-internal perception that This Is Not Librarian Work. Damn it, it’s the work I became a librarian to do. Don’t you tell me it’s not proper work for me, and don’t you tell me I’m not supposed to fit out my students for it.

I don’t do ref-desk shifts, although a few of my close colleagues do. I could, though, with the scaffolding provided me by my training and the local work environment. I know how to do a reference interview. I know how to select and search databases. I know my way around a reference collection (although the one here is admittedly… rather extensive). I wouldn’t be as good at it as somebody whose Real Job it is. Of course I wouldn’t. That’s okay; it’s not my Real Job.

But it’s a damn tiny number of my colleagues who would know where to begin—oh, let’s say putting together a package for DSpace batch import. I have the scaffolding for them, in my library of little Python haxies. There’s nothing conceptually or actually difficult about it. But they can’t, and the sense I get is that damn few of them would even consent to learn. That’s bad. That’s wrong. That should not be—and it will continue to be until the profession naturalizes systems work and the librarians who do it.

Also, just for a second, may I fulminate? Quoth the New Skills report: “Participants made frequent reference to XML as the current standard of choice for a container. A few participants reminded the group that for all its benefits, XML would—like all formats—ultimately become obsolete, and that information professionals must try to think beyond the horizon.” Those few participants? Need to locate a clue, badly. XML is not a good host format because it is futureproof in and of itself. It is a good host format because it is text-based, open and documented, and easily transformable. Given those, you don’t actually have to “think beyond the horizon.” What’s more important is thinking about the now, picking an XML language that actually makes sense given your problem domain and applying that language with skill and intelligence. If you do that, you can rest confident that whatever the horizon brings, you’ll figure something out.

That is, if you’re the type of library professional who sits down in front of computers and figures stuff out. Funny. We don’t seem to have too many of those.

I liked teaching back in the day, even in the Department from Hell. I still like teaching. My hammy nature comes out to play, as does the highly opinionated part of me that holds Strong Views on what folks ought to know about and be prepared for. I walked home from classes feeling good, and that was a sustaining influence given the up-and-downness evident in my day job lately.

(Still hate grading, but no jam comes sans pill.)

In general, I think my syllabus covered useful stuff. Next time, though, I want to do some hands-on work, and I’m already looking for notions (Andrea Mercado’s kioskification of Firefox looks like a good one!). I can teach a basic SQL query from scratch in an hour or two. I should. Ditto regular expressions and the basics of HTML and CSS. It’s all about expanding one’s daily technology toolkit.

Of the three major assignments, two were solid hits and the third… needs work. The job talk and the position-description assignment went over really well (how often do students thank you for assigning them work? well, mine thanked me!) and I was chuffed at how useful the job talks actually were, for the rest of the class and even for me. The third I may separate out into two or three smaller assignments—it really isn’t safe to assign big, relatively unstructured projects, because students get more stressed than they should. It’s a shame, because big and unstructured projects are what the real world is all about, but there seems to be a limit to how far a class can go in acting like the real world.

So I think “write an implementation plan or project documentation” and “install, theme, and mod a new server-based technology” can and should be done separately from each other, likely as the dreaded group projects. Live and learn.

Our local course management system sucks rocks and I refuse to use it ever again for anything. Next time I’m putting in a Drupal install, and we’ll interact online that way. The blogs worked reasonably well, but they’d be better in a Drupal install (like Five Weeks’s) because of increased opportunity for interaction among students.

Using del.icio.us as a tickler file for current events was a winner. For one thing, it helped me tie what I was teaching to the real world. For another, it modeled the professional behavior of keeping one’s ears perked for relevant news. For a third—hey, readings for next time! (Though I’m happy with the readings I found for this semester, and will reuse a lot of them.) Drupal’s RSS module should let me put a few good blogs and technology-news sources (Ars Technica for the win!) within student reach.

I’m scheduling quizzes next time, instead of doing them ad-hoc. Should be a stress reducer for everyone, me not least—several weeks I ought to have written up a quiz, but life just kept on intervening in that annoying way it has. No major exams, though; in a class like mine that’s just goofy.

I can’t say enough about how great the students were. They took a chance on a brand-new class from a brand-new instructor. They put up with my genial weirdness (did I mention the day I played two Monty Python clips in class?) and my insane outside schedule. They let me know how I could make the class better instead of grumbling out of earshot. They expressed gratitude early and often, and sometimes in embarrassingly fulsome terms. They took chances with their final projects, several of them, trusting me enough not to let fear of a poor grade hold them back.

I will be proud to have them as colleagues, and the library world will benefit from their presence in it.

Now if we could just get everyone everywhere to do it…

In so doing, I ran into one of the new faculty members at SLIS—there are quite a few of them, as SLIS was down to a skeleton crew the year I graduated, and is now getting back to something approaching a full slate.

We talked about my specialty, and New Faculty Member’s specialty, and the upcoming ASIST conference, and the iniquity of conference food in general, and…

… And eventually out came the siren. “Have you ever thought of pursuing the doctorate?”

I was good. I didn’t say “Now why would I do a damfool thing like that?” In hindsight, I should have laughed and said “One damn dissertator is enough for any family.” What I did explain was that research and I don’t get along.

Sirens. Gotta stomp them little suckers flat. I will say, though, I’m finding that easier to do than I used to.

I see my first Department from Hell advisor in the library fairly frequently these days. He doesn’t recognize me, but as someone I met at SLIS orientation once said, he never recognizes women—and to be fair, it has been nearly ten years, and even longer than that since he was my advisor to begin with.

He gets a polite smile from me, and if there’s a wee bit of self-satisfaction in that smile, I doubt he notices. Perception was never his strong suit.

Over the summer I often saw one of my classmates from back in the day, working busily at a laptop. She was the best teacher in the department, won prizes and everything. She recognized me, and we exchanged smiles but no more. Out of curiosity, I checked her out on Google. She’s adjuncting. The research I’m guessing she’s working on, must be happening on her own time. Thus doth academia reward its faithful. All hail academia!

Could have been me. Pretty likely would have been, too. I hated getting dumped out of the pond at the time, but I can’t help feeling lucky now. Found me a pond where I’m the right-size fish, I did.

(There was a good reason it took a while, but it’s a somewhat personnel-sensitive reason, so I won’t retail it here. Suffice to say I’m not mad at anybody; these things happen, and everybody was acting for the best.)

When I took this course, it was a fun eggheady exploration into the wilds of networking from which I actually learned quite a lot, though not all of it practical. Now… it’s being turned into an “introduction to technology” class which I get to guinea-pig. (Yes, it’s weird having a 600-level intro course; it won’t stay 600-level, I am told. Curriculum design is all Greek to me, so whatever.)

The catch in that for me is that I’m going to be teaching an intro course to a self-selected group of tech-savvy people. That is going to be an adventure. If they’re not throwing tomatoes by the end of the semester, I’ll call it a win.

My somewhat-sneaky plan is to focus on project-management, policy, getting-employed, and state-of-the-world topics, rather than trying to teach HTML to a bunch of people who could probably school me on web development. I won’t shy away from the techie by any means (if they can’t get around in one or two library flavors of XML by the time they’re out of my class, I am just a loser), but my emphasis is frankly on nudging them to learn to train themselves, because $DEITY knows it’s what they’ll have to do out here in the wild. (Besides, we all know about me and banging things with rocks, right? And the dealiebob where I took a job running DSpace without knowing any Java, Tomcat admin, or Postgres admin? Yeah. They gotta learn to teach themselves this stuff.)

Can’t talk about the final project yet, because I need to surprise them with it and at least one of them already reads CavLec (you know who you are, hello there!). However, I can mention that they’ll be doing a short “job talk” for me, as well as putting together a position description and interview questions for a tech-related library job. (Which I believe is harder than it sounds; I certainly shan’t let them get away with laundry-list of requirements, so they’re going to have to think.)

My biggest hangup is the whole authority thing. I don’t care about their grades. I don’t think they should care about their grades. But I have to grade them, and that makes me capital-A Authority, and I think that’s goofy because they are only my students for a semester, but they’re professional colleagues for a lifetime. Still working on how I’m going to get that idea across… but all in all, I’d rather be treated as a colleague they want to get along well with than an Authority they have to placate.

We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, this is an exercise in me putting my money (or my praxis, at least) where my mouth is.

I never found a round tuit, as happens not infrequently. Fortunately, that last-named trick is covered with remarkable sanity and decency in this short, sensible book.

What I admire most about it is its gentle but unrelenting effort to disabuse its audience of the false and pernicious messages and mindsets they bring with them from academia. Me, I am not gentle about this, not in the least—but my approach doesn’t work; you can’t tell a fish “that’s water, all around you, water; c’mon up out of it and grow some legs and then we’ll sort you out.” The poor fish doesn’t know what water is, because it’s never tasted air.

The book’s approach is less confrontational but more straightforward: here are things you must not do, here are things you must not say, here are things you must rethink. No whys or wherefores other than the strictly pragmatic “this will block your being hired.” No Cude- or Lovitts-style debunking of myths. Sorting all that out to arrive at a new understanding of the world takes perspective, a commodity most recent ex-academics, still thoroughly enmeshed in academia’s account of itself, don’t have in abundance. Therefore the book mostly doesn’t bother. Smart.

What it does do is model the new modes of thought and action extensively by means of case studies. Where I would say something like “Academia has a vested interest in your belief that it contains the smartest of the smart,” or even “Get over your damn dissertation already; it doesn’t make you All That,” the book quotes people talking approvingly about their new coworkers’ intelligence, or shows them reworking their résumés. Show, don’t tell. Very smart.

I plucked the new edition off the new-books shelf at MPOW because my husband is struggling with mid-dissertation sturm und drang and I have completely run out of ways to help him; he’s got the good old deer-in-the-headlights learned helplessness that New Librarian (also an academia-baby) had before him, and unlike New Librarian, he’s too acclimated to my standard goosing tactics to respond to them any more.

Which leads me to the book’s one defect: no advice for family and significant others! Now there is a book that needs to be written…

One thing does pop out at me, though. Remember the sirens? The “gee, you really should get a Ph.D” sirens? Remember me ignoring them? Resolutely, even? (And sometimes, I must say, rather profanely.)

Well, here I am, a bit short of two years after graduating. I’m published (though admittedly not peer-reviewedly). I’ve got invited talks to my credit, one of them international. I’m helping run an online conference. I’m on a new journal’s editorial board. I am not exactly at the forefront of my niche in the profession, but I’m not wholly unheard-of, either.

And I’m about to take a job in my niche in the place I most want to be. Going home, that’s what I’m doing.

Now, if I’d listened to the sirens, I’d be…

… not even done with coursework yet. Huh.

Don’t let anybody tell you you have to get a Ph.D in LIS. Anybody. Anybody at all. It’s not a racket, exactly—but damn, it’s next-door-to.

See how pretty the site is? Yes, well, we didn’t do that. The planning committee, that is. I was all ready to dive in and make yet another of my square boring blocky two-d non-lickable 1.0 site layouts, but…

But a library-school student named Heather Yager sent us an email asking if she could give us a hand. We took one look at her elegant portfolio site and said “Yes, please!”

Since Heather hasn’t bragged on her own work (I looked!), I’m going to brag on it for her. It’s darn good-looking stuff. Within the limits of the Drupal template she worked from, it’s well-coded stuff, too (despite my well-known unfondness for table layouts). And Heather did this in less than a month, on top of a full course load plus whatever else she’s doing.

She has been a joy to work with; I can say this with authority, as I’ve had the most contact with her of the planning committee. She is smart, highly technically proficient, articulate in writing, self-reliant, and invariably pleasant.

And what’s more, Heather took the initiative to contact us and volunteer her services. I admire that. A lot. And as soon as Heather goes on the job market, I will happily write as many recommendation letters and field as many phone calls as she needs me to. (I’m guessing that won’t be many. She’ll get snapped up fast.)

Library-school students could do far, far worse than try to emulate Heather Yager. I confidently predict she will be an excellent librarian.