Caveat Lector

Last night’s class session was a new one, not one I’d used last year. I taught them the basic idea behind a relational database along with a smidge of SQL, and the basic idea behind markup with a demo of validating an (intentionally broken) XHTML document.

They stuck right with me through elucidation of a few simple tables leading to a fairly complicated SQL query involving two nested subqueries. A couple-three bright lights were all “But that’s easy! And sensible! Why didn’t it happen until the 1960s?”

I love my students. I truly do.

Obviously there’s a lot more to SQL and databases than I could show them in a couple of hours. There’s a lot more to SQL and databases than I myself know anything about! Database optimization, query optimization, denormalization for performance—I am only an egg. I can’t do that stuff. Heck, joins still confuse me sometimes.

But my goal wasn’t to turn them into database and markup ninjas. My goal was to get across that neither databases nor markup is geek voodoo; they’re things that ordinary mortals can usefully work with. And in that sense, last night was a smashing success.

I don’t know the exact date and have no way to find out, but it must have been just about ten years ago that I called in to the university’s recordkeeping system from the TA office and pushed phone buttons until I had withdrawn from all my classes. I hung up the phone blinking back tears and swallowing against a lump in my throat. Feeling hollowed-out, I went back to my desk to do some grading—one can abandon one’s classwork; one cannot abandon one’s students—before I went home.

I can’t bring to mind exactly how I felt then, only what I did. The hot, angry despair I felt after imploding on the medieval-lit section of my master’s exams I remember very well indeed, but not what I felt at throwing in the towel finally. I was a walking zombie by then anyway. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t be anything except a fragile and beleaguered skin-shell around an inchoate sea of dread and bewilderment.

Could still teach, I grant myself that. I’m not a great teacher (I’ve known some; I don’t rate), but it takes a lot to push me so low I’m not at least competent. I haven’t found what can do that yet, in fact. Blowing up my life didn’t.

In hindsight, what amazes me is how quickly I put my life back together. A scant year after I made that phone call, I was a happy, reasonably skilled conversion peasant getting ready to go to my first big conference (at which I first heard Allen Renear speak, and isn’t it funny how life works?). Just a year. And yes, there’s a whacking lot of serendipity to acknowledge there, but still—one year. One scant year. It didn’t feel quick at the time, but by any objective measure, it was.

I’ve built two-and-a-bit professional identities since then: ebook content-standards maven, repository rat, and a little bit of moonlighting in library usability and design. Eh, and maybe another bit as a typesetter; I was just barely a journeyman at best, but there are a couple-three books still out there that I did. I seem to be nudging toward yet another professional identity as library educator.

Now, a professional identity is more than a job. I’ve had… well, if you count the temping stint and the part-time quasi-practicum… eight jobs in the last ten years, two of those little more than moonlights. (Whew. That number surprises me as much as it does you.) Plus two freelance gigs. I don’t consider anything a professional identity unless it’s eating my brain to the point that I blog about more than day-to-day minutiae. I blogged about ebooks, way back when. I blog about repositories constantly. When I’m irked, I blog about design. There’s also an element of external recognition involved, to be sure; I’ve never been the biggest fish in any of my ponds, but I’ve been noticed in all of them.

I’m working on getting the grad-school burnout story back up on Yarinareth proper. (Me? Lazy about bringing back my personal website? Imagine.) It’s desperately callow writing, I admit, but there’s a lot of truth in it still… and judging from my email, a lot of people who still need to read it, or feel that they’ve gained from reading it. I don’t consider “ex-wannabe-academic” a professional or even personal identity, but it, too, is something I’m known for.

It’s a propitious time to remember all that. I’m facing into a lot of fierce professional headwinds just at present, and the frustration and bewilderment have been overwhelming at times. What I know of myself, though, says that I’ll get myself back in gear, and that probably sooner than I imagine. Maybe a new professional identity will come of it, maybe not; but I’ll get by either way.

That’s not a bad thing to know.

It’s funny, what modeling a behavior in the classroom can do. News junkie that I am, I make a point of bringing in tidbits from the tech news and the biblioblogosphere that reinforce what’s going on in class and connect it to the real world. (Anybody who stalks my del.icio.us feed knows that “644,” which is my class number, is my most populous tag!) And darn if the first thing they asked me last night wasn’t “Are you going to talk about the new copyright czar?”

I wasn’t, because I had a full slate for last night (that I actually didn’t get all the way through, but it’s okay; I expected not to), but I sure will next week… and if I’m teaching them nothing else, clearly I’m teaching them to pay attention to the world around them.

I also found out that one of my final-project tasks was totally unreasonable. I still think it was feasible (I know how I’d do it!), but I’m an unreconstructed markup geek with lots of data-conversion experience; it was unfair of me to project that onto my poor students. The group that took on that job really went above and beyond to try to figure out how the pros do it. Unfortunately, however, the pros aren’t unreconstructed markup geeks. The task is being revised accordingly, and I hope the students aren’t too traumatized by the experience!

The biggest hassle with moving from eleven students to nearly forty is turning out to be calming their anxiety. I thought I wrote pretty clear instructions on my assignments, but apparently not! Ah, well, lessons for next time.

One of my students emailed me to say that this week’s networking readings inspired him to build a print server and a home network. Win!

As the classroom gradually filled yesterday evening, I heard highly gratifying tidbits about XML validators and server space and project blogs. I’ve been asked to talk about digital signatures and VPNs, and I’m looking hard at overhauling my lecture on security later in the semester.

Somebody in that classroom is doing something right. It’s not necessarily me! But somebody is.

I’d tell you how many people are in my class, except that I, um… actually don’t know. It looks like there were two drops, but there might have been three, and I know of one add, and I assure you, I’m just as confused as you are. I didn’t try to call roll—talk about futility and wasted time. I passed a sign-in sheet instead.

That said, I met the whole horde for the first time tonight, and it went okay, though forty is a very different experience from eleven. The room we’re in is crowded, which I expected, and also much too hot, which I didn’t and which was seriously wearisome (I don’t do air conditioning at home, so I managed okay, but some of them were wilting rather), but you deal with the space you got, and I mostly made it work.

They’re a forthcoming crew, which makes me really happy and will help class along no little. Several of them came up to talk to me, which is always a good sign; it means they’re not intimidated and I’m not a total ogre. We had a lot of fun with good old Abbot Trithemius and his librarian descendants (mad props to Sarah Shreeves of UIUC for finding me a paper from 1972 whose mere abstract had the room howling with laughter and an entirely salutary amount of “OMG whut?”), and we learned about job talks and twopointopians and bits and bytes and xkcd and Unicode and audio sampling and I swear it all made some kind of sense at the time, at least to me.

There was the minor detail that I was running purely on caffeine and adrenaline because I, um, forgot to go eat dinner. This was unwise of me and I will try not to do it again. There was also the not-so-minor detail of getting syllabi duplicated, which turned into a complete fiasco that was 90% my fault… I’m going to do my best to fix it in the morning, and I’ve stuck a copy on the class website for folks who can’t wait, so I hope they’ll forgive me for being a dunderhead.

Which, on balance, I think they will. They’re a good group, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester.

Notes to self (so that I don’t forget): Unicode guide (del.icio.us?), info on game emulators and digital preservation, show the data-death poem in class next week, remember to put digital signatures in the lecture on desktop security. (I had a student ask for that! ASK! How cool is that?)

So a lot of pixels are being spilled on datasets and credit for datasets. Nothing wrong with that. It is all to the good.

What makes me boggle rather is the pervasive idea that putting together a dataset is “not science.” Science is what comes afterwards and gets written up in a paper.

I’m just bewildered by that, honestly. If it usefully advances knowledge, who the hell cares whether it’s a dataset or a paper?

Academics do, apparently. Guess that’s another reason I keep refusing to be one.

I’ve gotten a couple of private questions about the University of Iowa’s ill-fated electronic thesis and dissertation program. What happened, in a nutshell, is that Iowa laid down an open-access ETD mandate, the creative-writing students balked because they sell their stuff and don’t want it OA, and the whole thing got very huffy very fast.

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.

When I was in library school, I had to learn how to do a reference interview, although I never intended to be a reference librarian. When I was in library school, I had to learn the basics of MARC, although I never intended to be a cataloguer. When I was in library school, I had to learn what a finding aid was and how it was put together, although I never intended to be an archivist. When I was in library school, I had to learn the basics of management and budgeting, although (at the time) I did not think I’d ever end up in library management.

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’m all done with teaching except for final-project grading and final-grade calculation, so it’s as good a time as any to post a post-mortem in case I do this again (and I’ve already been asked if I’d be willing). I’ve been leery of posting much about teaching, because several of my soon-to-be-former-students do read the blog, but hell… if Michael Stephens does it, can it be that bad?

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.

Oh my gosh, this is just brilliant. I have no words for how brilliant this is. Take an externality and make it internal. Make it hurt. Pure beauty.

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