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!
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okay here's a topic for you: define "works" and "behaves sensibly" in this context. like, what things would this software need to do, and on the wishlist including rainbow unicorns, what would you want it to?
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The other possible solutions to your question are to join archives or museums, as they generally have all the things you've described as being things you want, with a lot less likelihood of having to give tours to the general public (but possibly having to work well with individual researchers using the archives.) Cataloging and metadata in archives and museums is an entirely different ball of wax compared to libraries, but there's a fair amount of it to be done, along with construction of finding aids and answering questions.
no subject
Even pre-pandemic, 75% or more of our questions came in by email, the in person stuff not with co-workers involved a couple of people a week wanting to find things in our stacks, and then the occasional larger project that involves coordination.
When we're in the office, I and the two library assistants (both part time in the library, I'm the only full time library person) have desks (them) and an office (me) within nominal yelling across the open space distance, and we'd chat about stuff as it came up. These days, it's Google Chat, which works fine, honestly. There were plenty of days where I'd see 2-3 other people go through the space to the offices upstairs, and that was it.
I also work regularly with our archivist (and one of the library people is mostly in the archives) - they're in a space about 5 minutes away in the building, so even when we were in the office, we did a lot of by chat and meetings every week or two or as things came up.
My work is a mix of reference questions (again mostly by email), occasional web or phone calls for additional discussion/interviews (mostly because we have a collection where we get questions from people doing school projects for National History Day). And then longer-term project stuff, with 2 standing meetings most weeks right now, and usually 1-2 others depending on what's going on for internal stuff (and 1 every 2-3 weeks for work I'm contracted to do with another organisation in our field.)
I've also worked in a high school library (which I loved, even though teenagers are sometimes exhausting), but involved a lot of coordinating with all sorts of people and departmental politics at times. I also have worked in an academic library, and I liked parts of that a lot, but wow, the politics were fairly lethal.
The downside to my current job - which I love - is there's basically no upward mobility. People have usually stayed until they retire. Now that I've got my own office, quiet, a lot of autonomy over how I structure my day, and so on, it'd be hard to give that up, but my salary is on the low side for our metro area for someone who's mid-career as a librarian, and that's unlikely to change.
I'm mostly okay with that trade-off (especially having come from a job where I had 6+ months of continuous migraines due to background noise, a refusal to let me work somewhere that didn't trigger said migraines, and a lot of internal political nastiness... My immediate boss was great, but everyone above him, not as much.) But it's a really significant trade-off in some ways.
The other jobs that are sometimes fairly low interaction:
1) I have a friend who's a cataloger in our large library consortium, overseeing the stuff the consortium catalogs (mostly local history/local interest, and some foreign language materials.) She talks to a handful of coworkers most of the time, and there's no patron interaction. You have to love cataloging for that one, though, because basically, it's all cataloging all the time. (There are also not a lot of jobs like that total.)
2) There's also a few types of jobs which are sometimes combined with reference or other duties (that do have patron contact) but in some libraries are just the one thing with minimal patron contact - systems librarians jobs (need tech skills), interlibrary loan (mostly non-MLIS jobs), and some things like digital resources librarians.
no subject
It's still interesting to see how many people want to get into libraries because they think it will keep them away from people, when it's usually the opposite.
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I like people a lot, actually, but my migraines definitely like there being fewer people making lots of unpredictable noise while I'm trying to concentrate.
(I'm someone who can either do the people-facing stuff, or do detailed stuff, but trying to combine them is tricky, because I'm very reactive to noise around me. Jobs that have let me figure that out have been great, the places where I'm supposed to do the focused stuff in a noisy environment have... not.)
The other part I should mention is that my current job gets questions from everyone from about 4th grade through people in their 80s, and with a wide range of knowledge about what they're asking about (everything from, well, 4th graders to experts in their field) and from the US and internationally.
A big part of my job turns out to be figuring out how to meet that person where they are, and have reasonable boundaries about how we help (in keeping with library policies, larger institutional priorities, etc.) and express them kindly even when we can't help with a thing or need to say no to something specific.
That's a puzzle I actually really enjoy, but it's a particular set of social skills that a lot of people find super stressful.
My coworkers and I were talking last week about the fact that routinely, the people we've had the most difficulty with are grad students. Some of them are fantastic, but some of them show up and say "I'm doing a PhD on X. Do all my research for me on this vaguely explained subtopic." (To which we reasonably say "No" and "Here's how to do searches in our catalog" and "Here's what we can help with.")