Caveat Lector

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…

I spent most of my day Friday helping out with a one-day campus symposium (the payoff for me being a chance to flog the repository both in print and in person, which I duly did).

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.

It occurred to me last week that I started teaching grad school precisely ten years after I first taught college, back in the Department from Hell. I’m frankly amazed at how far I’ve gotten, despite all the twisty little paths I reconnoitered to get here.

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.

Well, that took a while, but… I have been informed that barring further administrative upheaval, I will be teaching LIS 644 for the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies this fall.

(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 once thought about writing a guide for graduate-school attriters. How to know when you’re slipping, how to know when you should never have done this in the first place but still forgive yourself for doing it, and most importantly, how to get out and move on.

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…

Some thoughts are percolating about libraryland, the retirement “crisis,” library school, and so on. I haven’t got time to whip them all into halfway-digestible form just at present.

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.

The call for participants is up for Five Weeks to a Social Library. Y’all come.

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.

Honest to Pete, you’d think a remedial-Java programming assignment was the end of the world, the way some of my classmates treat it.

Do I need to manage my buffer size to avoid the input file overflowing memory, asked somebody. Yeah, like the professor has time to sit there cackling at the carnage while twenty-odd student programs bring the JVM crashing down one after another. Puh-leeze. (And what is a guy who worries about buffer overflows doing in remedial Java, anyway?)

Then later they jawboned her into letting punctuation as well as whitespace be word delimiters. By that time I’d already turned my assignment in. Did I redo it? Did I hell. Sure, I could have. I have better things to do with my time, thanks.

Yesterday’s pop quiz was an exercise in how often we could be tripped up by sneaky little “features” of Java. I got all but one; not too shabby. We discussed Big-O algorithm analysis, which is conceptually rather nifty, but whose details (ugh, sigma notation, shoot me now) lead me to believe that a lot of “rigorous” software analysis boils down to not much more than the traditional Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.

There’s a guy in the class who will not stop staring at me. It’s not that I’m the only one with girl-cooties, either; there’s six other women in the room, not including the professor. Nor is it my stunning animal magnetism. I don’t have any. I’m the oldest and fattest woman in the room, and the homeliest to boot.

He just stares. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s that I don’t keep my mouth shut? Now that I think about it, mine is the only female voice I’ve heard in class (aside, again, from the professor’s). Eh, well, whatever. I just wish he’d cut it out.

A few months ago I had a shot at an invited speech, with attached honorarium. It fell through, which didn’t surprise or perturb me; the event in question is a high-stakes, high-visibility thing, so why would they take a chance on a newbie librarian with nothing to recommend her but some disreputable blog?

Dance, Ivan Tribble, dance while you can, laddie. I haven’t been pretending that CavLec is my ticket to fame and fortune. I’ve got two conference presentations, a professional-trade magazine article plus sidebar conference review (forthcoming), and at least one book review (book is on its way) to my credit for this calendar year, plus a book chapter (already written) and half a reference-book contract (argh, must get going on that!) to tally for next year. One of my conference presentations is getting a translation into Portuguese (and no, I’m not doing it; my Portuguese is far too rudimentary and rusty for that). I been busy.

Last week, it so happens, lightning struck. Twice. I now have two invited speeches on my calendar, and one of ’em’s even international! And both the folks who invited me, not to mention the person who asked me to write the trade-mag piece, said that they were long-time CavLec readers and that CavLec had had an influence on the decision to approach me.

Let’s be clear once again, I do not intentionally use CavLec as a professional tool. You won’t find it on my CV, not now and not ever. I never ever bring it up with professional acquaintances who don’t already know about it. If somebody comes to my door on account of CavLec, it’s not because I set it up as a red carpet.

And yet it is one, for a few people, all in spite of its style, content, and frankness. That’s something. Still dancing, Ivan boy?

I mean, if CavLec is all you know of me, why on earth would you think I can write something professional? I left an offer out of my tally above, a “wanna write a book?” offer that came about because my book chapter found favor. That’s the way things are supposed to go. I prove I can write right, I get asked to write more. CavLec is, shall we say, not exactly proof I can write right. (Oh, and I declined the offer, with sincere thanks and a “keep me in mind.” What I have to write about right now doesn’t quite fit with the book model of publication. In five years, things may well be different.)

I got a book out of the library the other day that was written in a style not too dissimilar from CavLec’s: Pip Coburn’s The Change Function. I dumped it on my return stack without making it through the introduction; the style was frankly grating, graceless and condescending self-puffery. I expect a little gracelessness in a blog; it even adds spice. In a book? No, thank you.

I can write professionally, even though it’s not my native or my favorite register, and I think the stuff coming out soon will adequately demonstrate that. Those of you who have been paying close and careful attention to CavLec (all three of you) may even have noticed that I have retuned my posts on open access to a much more professional and less, well, CavLeccy pitch. That was a conscious decision, made because I know how often my open-access posts are getting cited on Open Access News, outside those posts’ context of standard CavLec snark, and I feel I have a certain duty to represent the side with a little more than my usual grace.

Still and all, even before most of the professional writing I’ve been doing saw the light of day, CavLec picked me a couple of ripe, juicy plums. Maybe Ivan Tribble’s right, and a blog is a death-sentence for an academic career, but Tribble could never prove that off me.

Somewhere there’s a tattoo artist who does “Perpetual Student” with all the appropriate flourishes. I won’t say I don’t deserve it, because come Tuesday I’m starting courses again.

Nobody panic, it’s just nondegree info-systems stuff (and likely pass-fail to save the lecturer some grading), because I’m tired of not having all the clues I ought to. Besides, this clue-gathering is free-as-in-beer because it’s a job perq, so I’d be silly not to let MPOW buy me a clue.

Applying for admission, even for nondegree student status, is as much of a stupid bureaucratic farce as ever, I must say. Why hasn’t anyone come up with a secure electronic transcript request/fulfillment system yet? I’m tired of filling out stupid forms and paying ridiculous amounts of money for something that should be as simple as I web-form a request to OldSkool, OldSkool crypto-signs and sends the transcript to my school, my school decrypts with OldSkool’s public key, end of story. Bah, silly systems. Relying on paper in this day and age.