Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2020-12-05 11:37 pm
silveradept) wrote2020-12-05 11:37 pm
December Days 2020 #05: TISHLILS(HIBPA): Common Misconceptions
[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
A variation on a previous theme of December Days, and based on a question that I asked elsewhere in a completely different context, which has nothing to do with public libraries.
The most common thing that people don't understand about working in the public library is there's almost no time at all to read while working. Lots of people joke at us about getting to read on the help desk, and more people than not talk about how much they love books when they talk about the library and working there, which is one of the fastest ways to make sure your application gets nowhere, because books are one part (a visible part) of the library work experience, but is not, in any way, shape or form, the primary part of library work. People are, and if you don't like working with people, many positions in the public library system will be unsuitable for you. This is something that doesn't always come through in the coursework, but if you're not someone already working in the library world when you go for your Master's, the practical experience requirement will make it abundantly clear that materials are secondary and subsidiary at best to all the time you will spend interacting with and managing people. Which makes it something I learned in library school, because I was paying attention.
What wasn't clear, because I selected practical experience that only lasted for a few months, right in the middle of the busiest time of year for youth services librarians, is, well, how little actual work in a public library resembles the things that are taught in school. Some of that is due to the organization I work for, because they have people specifically devoted to the task of researching and buying materials. Also, it's true that most of the cataloging done for library stuff is done at the vendor level rather than at the librarian level, and we buy their cataloging to import rather than doing it ourselves. Same thing for website design: so many of library websites are "whatever skin and branding we've put on the modules bought from a vendor." (Secret of the library world: you can make a lot of money if you create a product that actually works and behaves sensibly in a library environment, because there's basically zero competition from anyone else for the product you create. If you have it adhere to stated library ideals like privacy, you would make even more, but a lot of companies figure they can collect and sell data without consequences because there's nobody else in the market competing with them.)
I don't want to come across as snobbish about the work that every library employee does, regardless of their classification, when I say that there isn't a whole lot of the scenarios we learned in library school happening in the public job. Because everyone who works at a library is a librarian, able to do anything, in the eyes of the public, even if there are classification levels with different duties and responsibilities, so everyone has to be able do a little bit of everything. (There's an entire Discourse that pops up every now and then about what the Master's degree is actually good for, apart from gatekeeping and ensuring that only white people of means are able be librarians and managers of libraries. "The theoretical and philosophical foundations of librarianship" is usually the consensus answer, but that's not actually helpful if the philosophy and theory of librarianship is grounded in white supremacy, elitism, vocational awe, "civilizing the masses," "cultivating citizenship," and exporting those ideas to other groups primarily through the vehicle of Nice White Ladies who will be accorded victim status if someone criticizes library actions or principles.) Instead, working with the public is much more similar to being a floor worker in a retail establishment and the first line of people encountered when someone calls a a support line all rolled into one thing. Really, the differences between librarians and not-librarians mostly move in the direction of whether you can buy or get rid of things in the collection on philosophical as well as practical grounds, how much time you're allowed to spend answering people's questions (and perhaps which ones you get), and whether you're going to be explicitly or implicitly expected to manage other people or their work. (That graduate school debt doesn't sound all that great now, does it? At least not for public services.)
How things manifest in the public sphere, rather than being able to sit in a silent library, read books, and possibly consume bon-bons, is instead having to work with people on things that are mostly the same. How to get a library card. How to sign into the computers. How to take care of fines and fees. Accessing resources online. Pointing people in the direction of the actual websites for various things, rather than scam sites. Telling people that the grand majority of those e-mails they get claiming to be from somewhere are scam e-mails and should just be deleted. Explaining how to properly connect to the Wi-Fi. And to the electronic books. Which means explaining how to load the app store and find the right app for that, and then to type in their library card number and password to authenticate. At least I get to then do programming, too, so story times and programs means working with kids and teens and otherwise not having to do the same things all the time. What's missing from all of this is the thing that our schools tried very hard to sell us on as the thing that would be the most satisfying and thrilling parts of our librarian experience, those deep dives and in-depth reference questions where we'd go through the resources and lovingly craft a detailed response to an appreciative audience. I mean, apart from how that's not at all how people gather information to solve their problems (and they did teach us Bates's berry-picking theory of information behavior, among so many others, so it's not like we couldn't have drawn the right conclusions ourselves), most members of the public just don't want that kind of depth in their inquiries. Our friends in special libraries are more likely to get those kinds of questions, because the people coming to their libraries usually are doing so because the collection and the people there have that in-depth knowledge they're seeking, but the general public is usually much more interested in the answer that helps them move along right now, not the answer that will help them understand what they're asking and may possibly help them move several stages along the path without having to come back to the library for more information. The upside, such that it is, is that repeated visits certainly helps the statistics, which is, regrettably, still an important and necessary part of convincing the people who fund you that you're doing enough with those funds to justify you continued existence, but the statistics are usually the worst measure of figuring out whether a library is effective. So, while library school wanted us to believe that people are coming for information requests that will take time and research and thought to put together and then deliver to an appreciative audience, it's far more likely that people are coming because they have an immediate need that we can fulfill for them, and then they will disappear until they have another immediate need to be fulfilled. Which can leave librarians feeling like a large amount of their skillset and deep knowledge goes unheard and unused while people repeatedly try to get the search engines to spit out useful knowledge as they put in completely unhelpful keywords that don't describe what they actually want. While having to exercise their people skills and their "get people started" skills over and over and over again, because that's what's in demand from their population.
So those are the two most common errors that people have about public library work. It's not a cathedral of silence where there's all sorts of spare time to read books and improve upon our reader's advisory skills by knowing the collection better. It's also not the place where profound and deep questions that require research and resources tend to get asked, at all. So the public is disappointed that their stereotypes are wrong, and the librarians find out a lot of what they learned in school while they were paying attention doesn't turn out to have a lot of use when confronted by the reality of their assignment. (Or, at least, it's not useful in the ways it was taught to them. A lot of those skills are useful and helpful all the same, but in forms that are very different than the way they were taught or introduced.) It's a fun time for everbody!
A variation on a previous theme of December Days, and based on a question that I asked elsewhere in a completely different context, which has nothing to do with public libraries.
What are things people understand the least about working in a public library?
The most common thing that people don't understand about working in the public library is there's almost no time at all to read while working. Lots of people joke at us about getting to read on the help desk, and more people than not talk about how much they love books when they talk about the library and working there, which is one of the fastest ways to make sure your application gets nowhere, because books are one part (a visible part) of the library work experience, but is not, in any way, shape or form, the primary part of library work. People are, and if you don't like working with people, many positions in the public library system will be unsuitable for you. This is something that doesn't always come through in the coursework, but if you're not someone already working in the library world when you go for your Master's, the practical experience requirement will make it abundantly clear that materials are secondary and subsidiary at best to all the time you will spend interacting with and managing people. Which makes it something I learned in library school, because I was paying attention.
What wasn't clear, because I selected practical experience that only lasted for a few months, right in the middle of the busiest time of year for youth services librarians, is, well, how little actual work in a public library resembles the things that are taught in school. Some of that is due to the organization I work for, because they have people specifically devoted to the task of researching and buying materials. Also, it's true that most of the cataloging done for library stuff is done at the vendor level rather than at the librarian level, and we buy their cataloging to import rather than doing it ourselves. Same thing for website design: so many of library websites are "whatever skin and branding we've put on the modules bought from a vendor." (Secret of the library world: you can make a lot of money if you create a product that actually works and behaves sensibly in a library environment, because there's basically zero competition from anyone else for the product you create. If you have it adhere to stated library ideals like privacy, you would make even more, but a lot of companies figure they can collect and sell data without consequences because there's nobody else in the market competing with them.)
I don't want to come across as snobbish about the work that every library employee does, regardless of their classification, when I say that there isn't a whole lot of the scenarios we learned in library school happening in the public job. Because everyone who works at a library is a librarian, able to do anything, in the eyes of the public, even if there are classification levels with different duties and responsibilities, so everyone has to be able do a little bit of everything. (There's an entire Discourse that pops up every now and then about what the Master's degree is actually good for, apart from gatekeeping and ensuring that only white people of means are able be librarians and managers of libraries. "The theoretical and philosophical foundations of librarianship" is usually the consensus answer, but that's not actually helpful if the philosophy and theory of librarianship is grounded in white supremacy, elitism, vocational awe, "civilizing the masses," "cultivating citizenship," and exporting those ideas to other groups primarily through the vehicle of Nice White Ladies who will be accorded victim status if someone criticizes library actions or principles.) Instead, working with the public is much more similar to being a floor worker in a retail establishment and the first line of people encountered when someone calls a a support line all rolled into one thing. Really, the differences between librarians and not-librarians mostly move in the direction of whether you can buy or get rid of things in the collection on philosophical as well as practical grounds, how much time you're allowed to spend answering people's questions (and perhaps which ones you get), and whether you're going to be explicitly or implicitly expected to manage other people or their work. (That graduate school debt doesn't sound all that great now, does it? At least not for public services.)
How things manifest in the public sphere, rather than being able to sit in a silent library, read books, and possibly consume bon-bons, is instead having to work with people on things that are mostly the same. How to get a library card. How to sign into the computers. How to take care of fines and fees. Accessing resources online. Pointing people in the direction of the actual websites for various things, rather than scam sites. Telling people that the grand majority of those e-mails they get claiming to be from somewhere are scam e-mails and should just be deleted. Explaining how to properly connect to the Wi-Fi. And to the electronic books. Which means explaining how to load the app store and find the right app for that, and then to type in their library card number and password to authenticate. At least I get to then do programming, too, so story times and programs means working with kids and teens and otherwise not having to do the same things all the time. What's missing from all of this is the thing that our schools tried very hard to sell us on as the thing that would be the most satisfying and thrilling parts of our librarian experience, those deep dives and in-depth reference questions where we'd go through the resources and lovingly craft a detailed response to an appreciative audience. I mean, apart from how that's not at all how people gather information to solve their problems (and they did teach us Bates's berry-picking theory of information behavior, among so many others, so it's not like we couldn't have drawn the right conclusions ourselves), most members of the public just don't want that kind of depth in their inquiries. Our friends in special libraries are more likely to get those kinds of questions, because the people coming to their libraries usually are doing so because the collection and the people there have that in-depth knowledge they're seeking, but the general public is usually much more interested in the answer that helps them move along right now, not the answer that will help them understand what they're asking and may possibly help them move several stages along the path without having to come back to the library for more information. The upside, such that it is, is that repeated visits certainly helps the statistics, which is, regrettably, still an important and necessary part of convincing the people who fund you that you're doing enough with those funds to justify you continued existence, but the statistics are usually the worst measure of figuring out whether a library is effective. So, while library school wanted us to believe that people are coming for information requests that will take time and research and thought to put together and then deliver to an appreciative audience, it's far more likely that people are coming because they have an immediate need that we can fulfill for them, and then they will disappear until they have another immediate need to be fulfilled. Which can leave librarians feeling like a large amount of their skillset and deep knowledge goes unheard and unused while people repeatedly try to get the search engines to spit out useful knowledge as they put in completely unhelpful keywords that don't describe what they actually want. While having to exercise their people skills and their "get people started" skills over and over and over again, because that's what's in demand from their population.
So those are the two most common errors that people have about public library work. It's not a cathedral of silence where there's all sorts of spare time to read books and improve upon our reader's advisory skills by knowing the collection better. It's also not the place where profound and deep questions that require research and resources tend to get asked, at all. So the public is disappointed that their stereotypes are wrong, and the librarians find out a lot of what they learned in school while they were paying attention doesn't turn out to have a lot of use when confronted by the reality of their assignment. (Or, at least, it's not useful in the ways it was taught to them. A lot of those skills are useful and helpful all the same, but in forms that are very different than the way they were taught or introduced.) It's a fun time for everbody!