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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#9: "I can make changes in my organization."
One of the worst things that happens to anyone who has finished their library school training is while they have the tools and the perspective to see their organizations from outside angles and to bring useful solutions and new ways of thinking to new problems and intractable ones, their organizations insist on wasting that potential by hammering all of that outside perspective and new knowledge out of them so they can instead learn how the organization has always done things, will continue to do things, and how things get done in the bureaucracy, so you know whose permission you have to obtain before even beginning the legwork toward doing something and how likely it is that someone in one of the managerial level above you will decide to crush it. (If you're lucky, they might even explain why.)
I've been with the same organization that hired me out of university, and that's had ups and downs, and a lot of it has been downs compared to relatively few ups. Or perhaps it's because the downs were a deviation from an otherwise unremarked-upon amount of excellence that we all simply take for granted as The Standard. (Given how little there seems to be formal praise thrown around for doing the awesome things we do, I'm inclined to believe there's at least some amount of "we're used to it" going on that would be well-disrupted by someone looking at it from the outside.)
In my case, in addition to all of my coursework, I came out of university with a full head of steam that video gaming programs were what I would bring with me to my new workplace, having seen just how well they were working for one of my internship libraries. There were obviously going to be enough interested participants that we could get several things going quickly and efficiently. At which point I ran face-first into the organizational culture, usually delivered with the remark that "well, here's not [where you did your internship]." Rather than "You're new here, and we want to take advantage of that newness to see where we might improve, or to pick your brain about new and exciting things that you studied and worked with during your schooling." While I was quickly able to grasp the end-around available to me that was using my Friends of the Library group to purchase consoles, games, and to then put programming on with the new material that I had just received, and the library system did eventually purchase a couple of systems for the entire library system to share among themselves, it was a wild success anywhere there was someone who could put time and effort into it, and a complete flop elsewhere, because the time and effort was what was needed to build a regular group of people coming, and the way that things were structured, it was nearly impossible to achieve regularity at anywhere other than my main location (or any other location where there was someone regularly willing to come in.) An even with the receipts of the program numbers and the regulars, I had my number of programs slashed almost immediately because it was "taking too much of my time," and because I was focusing too much on one of my age group responsibilities.
I can understand that in some other industries and professions, there's less need, perhaps, to try and stay on top of innovations and to recruit widely, but in this one, given how many of us, once we have a stable position, we tend to stay in it until we change or retire, there's a definite need for regular infusions of new thinking into our professional lives. And not everyone takes the time to read widely or to make friends and/or social media follows with a wide variety of opinionated people representing a wide variety of experiences. (Library Twitter was one of those places you could tap into, before it became Elon's Folly.) And if you're in a more rural place, or a system that only has a few locations and far too little staff to adequately run them, I can understand how new ideas often get defeated by the cold hand of logistics and the understanding that there will never be enough staff and money available to do things. Perhaps most damningly, however, is the way that libraries are a fundamentally small-c conservative institution, and therefore they react to change slowly and fearfully.
So let me provide a little more context about how I came in hot and got a bucket of ice water dumped on me within the first few years of being at my workplace. My organization, as a multi-location county system, has a fairly stable source of funding, being its own taxing district, and therefore is not reliant upon having to play municipal politics for a minuscule share of the city budget and watching in envy and disgust as the police department can demand whatever they want in the name of "public safety" and be reasonably assured that no matter how heinously they behave, they will get exactly what they demanded, because they can contract "blue flu" any time they want the rest of us to understand how little power we have over them. My hiring came after a successful political campaign to the voting residents that giving the library more funding would result in more services and more open hours for all of our locations, because they would spend a lot of it on hiring in new people and purchasing new materials. (This is one of the ways someone gets their foot in the door in libraries, and it's usually more pleasant than someone jumping to a new location or system, retiring, or dying.) So I'm one of an entire cohort of people being hired in full-time to the library system, and the timing on it is wonderful for me, because I haven't been out of library school for that long. Sure, it means packing up and traveling across several states, but I was planning on leaving my location at the time anyway because there were no positions open that would successfully pay a living wage and allow me to pay my student loans. We weren't really hired in to this system on the promise that we'd be bringing new ideas to branch out from the solid standards of public library service and to find new, innovative, and interesting ways of serving our population.
Further hindering the possibility of innovation sneaking in through the doors were that our staffing was set up where there was at least one Youth Services Librarian for all of the "large" locations (even though mine was currently working out of a converted auto parts store while the new, bigger, grander, integrated building was being built. It wouldn't be completed until four years into my tenure, and they only gave us a ground floor space, instead of recognizing the building they'd built was the library, and whatever else they were planning for city integration would have to be in a separate building entirely.) but only two librarians to handle all of the Teen Services across all of the locations. Now, technically, my remit as a Youth Services Librarian is birth to eighteen years of age (and handling their caregivers), so it was entirely possible that the cohort could be put to use helping the Teen Services librarians do teen-focused programming, but in practice, the expectation was that anything that required in-person-ness would be handled by the Teen Services librarians, and the rest of us could use kit programming if we wanted to (or occasionally help out for big projects that couldn't be done by the two of them.) It's only in the last five years that we've added more librarians and a cohort of specialists to build them out into a whole nine people, still handling programming across nineteen locations, despite it being a known thing that teens are library users, too, rather than pests needing discipline for the entire time that I've been employed in this system. (Not that this knowledge always translates into doing things well, because there's still a strong impulse in a lot of library workers and patrons that teenagers, especially, should never be heard or seen unless they're completely silent and working on their academics.)
So I come in hot with the idea that video game programming is going to be a good idea, and that it's going to bring in teenagers, who don't really have a space-as-such, but who are definitely looking for somewhere to be after school, and the game programming will pull them into the meeting room space (which, in this case, was also right next to the quiet reading area.) so they have a place where they can be supervised loud and it'll be great. At every turn, though, when I say these were successful programs that I saw in my last locations, the upper management wasn't interested. The teen librarians were, but they were already overworked. Since I was the spare librarian, sort of, and I didn't find teenagers inherently repugnant (I don't think any of my other youth services coworkers have, to be clear, but still, rolling the boulder uphill), I pretty well had decided to myself that I was a Teen Services Minion for when things needed getting done or programming needed implementing, and that I would be spending more of my time trying to build good teen relationships, while also handling my story time, school, and collection duties.
The games program worked spectacularly, even more so when the next Smash Brothers released and we played the absolute hell out of it for years. When we had unexpected dollars to help get some nice things for the new buildings, I suggested Nintendo DS systems. They were designated for in-branch use only, but they were extremely popular. When we swapped over to having the controllers for the Wii available for checkout, since the teen area got a screen, they circulated extremely well. (Much to the aggravation of some of my co-workers, who wanted something to be done about the volume problem from the teen area, and since the building's design flaws could not be corrected, that meant the problem was the teens.) Every single time I've gone in for gaming at my location, it's gone over well, but every single time I've done it, I've had to go through the Friends groups (who weren't going to argue with the receipts I was bringing), at least until the system finally decided they didn't like the idea of some locations having access to more financial and programming resources through their Friends groups and provided us all with programming and supply budgets. The pandemic-related shutdown of buildings and the accidental breaking of the teen area screen put a damper on the game programming, but even the small amount that I'm doing now is going well with the target audiences. Admittedly, now that we have a Teen Librarian in-location, I have been able to step down to actually being Minion, rather than the Teen Librarian in all but name, but for my career up through the shutdown, I did a lot of those things, including handling collection responsibilities in YA. (I didn't apply for the additional Teen Librarian positions because I like my story times too much. Minion is fine, honestly.)
So despite being able to show and show and show that this was a good direction to go in, there was a lot of complaining about noise, about kids and teens coming up at all hours to change programs or get controllers and make more work for desk staff, and how some of them were thrilled when the screen broke and there wasn't any more need to handle things, and then at the eventual retirement of the DS systems due to the pandemic shutdown. The systems that were in the Youth Services area saw very little use, since there weren't that many people interested in using them, and because they had to be picked up and returned to the central location, rather than being shippable in the delivery system. The Teen Librarian has made some rumblings about wanting to pick up video games as a circulating collection, which I think will be awesome, but which I also think will be met with fierce resistance at all levels, because carrying video games would then be admitting they're a legitimate form of expression, and that it might be worth investing some money into getting a circulating collection going. (The big concern that shows up is almost always "well, they're just going to get stolen anyway.") There's the more practical concerns about what systems to carry software for, but I expect a high degree of resistance to getting it off the ground because this library system is fundamentally conservative, and they don't want to do something that might make them stand out in any way.(And because we've supposedly been in "bridge" and "rebuilding" years while our upper management gets their shit sorted out and tried to build an organizational structure that doesn't bottleneck immediately and doesn't fall over in a stiff breeze or mild stress.)
In other matters, I also find myself running into barriers when I would like to suggest some changes. I will freely admit I have a technological bias, and that I would like this system to be more leading edge than it is with regard to technology and services offered, even as I realize that most of the users that we have are not going to be on the leading edge of any technology in their life, and are most likely going to be dealing with things that have been given to them by work or by relatives who are upgrading their own devices more toward the leading edge. In many of those situations, I am thwarted by the reality that because we can only pay public library salaries, we're only going to get public library IT people. It makes me think about how Google swooped in to Kansas City, did an entire digital infrastructure upgrade, and expected there to be way more technology adaptation and use than there turned out to be in the space. Here the Kansas City Library is, in 2022, promoting the Affordable Connectivity Program, pointing out that even though Google made Google Fiber available there ten years ago, it didn't put a dent in the number of people still using library internet access. The pandemic shutdowns made it abundantly clear in most communities as to who was going to do fine with the devices they had, and who needed significant supports to be able to do things like continue schoolwork over digital methods. And how many residents in those communities did not have home Internet access or did not have good enough home Internet access to handle a high-bandwidth situation like a videoconference for the school day. Many schools and libraries went at the problem by providing devices and hotspots for people to check out so they would have reliable Internet at home to do work and schooling. A fair number of libraries learned how to do programming online and maintain their connections with their communities. We did not offer hotspots and devices (honestly, it seemed like getting everyone in staff a computer and getting the VPN stabilized enough to use reliably was a big lift), and our virtual programming was mostly ad-hoc and performed by the people who were interested in doing so until it got through that it was going to be a while before we could open locations again, and then things got more organized. As soon as we started processing materials again, though, some of the virtual programming was curtailed. And then, when we reopened our doors, almost all of the rest of that programming was wiped out. We still do some virtual programming, for situations where, say, gathering a group of adventures would only be possible online, and virtual is often the way to get programming from farther away than we might normally look, but it seems like we have a lot of push to not do that much virtual any more, because we have the buildings open again and that's what's important. Much like other places, after demonstrating that we could do the thing, and do it pretty well, we're stuffing all of that back into the box as if it were a fun experiment that we are not going to speak of again. (Except in Teen services, where one of the things they went with "forgiveness before permission" as a guiding principle is still going extremely strong, even with interference to try and close it down or bring it under the strangling control of our marketers. Teen Services has all the receipts there, too, but I'm sure the pressure will ratchet up on them to close things down until it can't be ignored or the library makes them cut it loose.
As for loaning computers or hotspots out of the building, both of which are things I think we should do, that conservatism strikes again, even as other library systems around us have developed and implemented their versions of hotspot and device lending. We only lend laptops for only in-branch use, where the wireless is. We extended the range of our wireless networks to get to the parking lot in many places we owned, but we didn't then, and don't now, consider hotspot lending or even computer lending for outside the library. Some of that, I suspect, is still that our IT department is understaffed and overmatched to the amount of things they could be doing or that would be helpful for all of our experiences, staff and users alike, and has been for likely at least as long as I have been working at the space. Public library wages, public library people. Beyond that, however, situations such as that require a certain amount of being willing to accept that we may not have all the answers, but we have enough of them to move forward, and that often means that managers have to have their ducks in a row so that when an idea comes to them, they know what to do with it and can ask and answer good questions about it. Hotspot lending because it's a cool and trendy thing is not something that our library would engage with, unless someone high enough up the decision chain decided we wanted to do it, then we'd do it. Even with a formal Big Ideas plan for generating computer and hotspot combos that could be lent out from our locations, the people reviewing it had a fundamental misunderstanding of what was sought, thinking it was for installing some computers in a specific location with Internet access, rather than lending them out to the public. Once that was cleared up, the idea did not go any further in the process.
Maybe it's that my ideas are not easily understandable? All I have at the moment is anecdata, because I don't know where the real data could be, but it seems to me that our library users are usually in for printing things off, browsing the web, watching multimedia, and doing document work. All of which could theoretically be achieved without having to pay for site licenses for Windows machines, even if we get them at a deep discount. There are all programs that can do this, and do so with reasonable compatibility with Windows programs like Microsoft Office. So I would like to know what the savings are if we swapped all of our Windows desktops for Linux. Possibly even the laptops, too. I know there are effective remote administration tools for Linux machines, and it might produce a security improvement if we switched and then made some decisions about hardening and securing the machines more. It would require having people learn how to sysadmin Linux machines, but that could be trained or hired out for. Although I don't know at what cost.
Staff machines could probably also go in that direction - there are a few programs that are much friendlier to Windows that we use that we might have to find alternatives for, or swap from using the application version of the system to a web-based version of it (which our ILS just turned on in the latest update), or use a different application to access the same server and data. We'd probably have to find another single sign-on solution to replace something like Active Directory. Or we might have to provision a fairly small number of Windows or Mac machines because an essential program for a department doesn't have an effective Linux equivalent. But that seems much more cost-efficient in hardware and the length of being able to use and keep the hardware updated. I don't know if the salaries we'd need to offer for the administrators of the servers and machines would eat those savings and possibly more, but I really am curious and would like to see a library system actually do a full conversion and see where the pain points are and whether there are things that really do require some other operating system to use for library operations. (What probably kills this idea before it can get started is the sheer scale of the possible operation, and all of the things that would have to be thought up and implemented and refined and otherwise made ready for primetime. It would absolutely have to be something that had a sign-off from people very high in the organization and to make sure there was enough capacity in IT to get it done. And because it would be a radical change and our organization really does not like radical change.
So I basically don't suggest big things like that any more, not unless I think the actual people involved would be receptive to it. Like how I don't suggest that we should partner with some organization where they buy the technology and make it friendly for use, and then we find ways of giving it away to the people who need it. So not just low-cost (although we can promote that, too), but gratis machines that might be the difference between being able to afford some connectivity along with the machine or having nothing. Having spent enough time absorbing how things are actually done and what processes need to be followed, and who needs to sign off on it, and knowing just how much the correct attitude to take is "forgiveness rather than permission" with anything that you can do yourself or with a low number of co-conspirators, I sometimes say that I'll put in a ticket, but I don't expect any results. I just recently filed a ticket asking for all of our work machines to offer Firefox instead of Chrome as the browser, because of Chrome's impending changes to make adblocking harder and the necessity of good adblocking against malvertising appearing in search engine results. I formatted it correctly so that it would get sent to the correct teams for their evaluation. And after filing the ticket, I basically forgot about it, because I'm pretty sure it's not going to go anywhere. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it does.
This is not a happy story, because it's basically a story of failure and blockading and a neurodivergent person looking at things, having a possible solution, asking if we can implement it, and being told "no" for reasons that don't always end up in the "okay, that's fair" column. And that's with things that I've been trying to do that are ultimately on the less important end, because there are other possible ways of obtaining technology or putting in programming. For the people who have been trying to get the organization to change their culture to be better at providing good working environments for non-white colleagues, for non-cis colleagues, they not only have to deal with the fundamental conservatism, but all of the additional problems that come from dealing with a profession that is primarily white women, and with a lot of white women in positions of leadership. They probably have long since stopped believing in the statement that they can make change entirely. Yet nobody seems to think of that as the major condemnation that it is.
#9: "I can make changes in my organization."
One of the worst things that happens to anyone who has finished their library school training is while they have the tools and the perspective to see their organizations from outside angles and to bring useful solutions and new ways of thinking to new problems and intractable ones, their organizations insist on wasting that potential by hammering all of that outside perspective and new knowledge out of them so they can instead learn how the organization has always done things, will continue to do things, and how things get done in the bureaucracy, so you know whose permission you have to obtain before even beginning the legwork toward doing something and how likely it is that someone in one of the managerial level above you will decide to crush it. (If you're lucky, they might even explain why.)
I've been with the same organization that hired me out of university, and that's had ups and downs, and a lot of it has been downs compared to relatively few ups. Or perhaps it's because the downs were a deviation from an otherwise unremarked-upon amount of excellence that we all simply take for granted as The Standard. (Given how little there seems to be formal praise thrown around for doing the awesome things we do, I'm inclined to believe there's at least some amount of "we're used to it" going on that would be well-disrupted by someone looking at it from the outside.)
In my case, in addition to all of my coursework, I came out of university with a full head of steam that video gaming programs were what I would bring with me to my new workplace, having seen just how well they were working for one of my internship libraries. There were obviously going to be enough interested participants that we could get several things going quickly and efficiently. At which point I ran face-first into the organizational culture, usually delivered with the remark that "well, here's not [where you did your internship]." Rather than "You're new here, and we want to take advantage of that newness to see where we might improve, or to pick your brain about new and exciting things that you studied and worked with during your schooling." While I was quickly able to grasp the end-around available to me that was using my Friends of the Library group to purchase consoles, games, and to then put programming on with the new material that I had just received, and the library system did eventually purchase a couple of systems for the entire library system to share among themselves, it was a wild success anywhere there was someone who could put time and effort into it, and a complete flop elsewhere, because the time and effort was what was needed to build a regular group of people coming, and the way that things were structured, it was nearly impossible to achieve regularity at anywhere other than my main location (or any other location where there was someone regularly willing to come in.) An even with the receipts of the program numbers and the regulars, I had my number of programs slashed almost immediately because it was "taking too much of my time," and because I was focusing too much on one of my age group responsibilities.
I can understand that in some other industries and professions, there's less need, perhaps, to try and stay on top of innovations and to recruit widely, but in this one, given how many of us, once we have a stable position, we tend to stay in it until we change or retire, there's a definite need for regular infusions of new thinking into our professional lives. And not everyone takes the time to read widely or to make friends and/or social media follows with a wide variety of opinionated people representing a wide variety of experiences. (Library Twitter was one of those places you could tap into, before it became Elon's Folly.) And if you're in a more rural place, or a system that only has a few locations and far too little staff to adequately run them, I can understand how new ideas often get defeated by the cold hand of logistics and the understanding that there will never be enough staff and money available to do things. Perhaps most damningly, however, is the way that libraries are a fundamentally small-c conservative institution, and therefore they react to change slowly and fearfully.
So let me provide a little more context about how I came in hot and got a bucket of ice water dumped on me within the first few years of being at my workplace. My organization, as a multi-location county system, has a fairly stable source of funding, being its own taxing district, and therefore is not reliant upon having to play municipal politics for a minuscule share of the city budget and watching in envy and disgust as the police department can demand whatever they want in the name of "public safety" and be reasonably assured that no matter how heinously they behave, they will get exactly what they demanded, because they can contract "blue flu" any time they want the rest of us to understand how little power we have over them. My hiring came after a successful political campaign to the voting residents that giving the library more funding would result in more services and more open hours for all of our locations, because they would spend a lot of it on hiring in new people and purchasing new materials. (This is one of the ways someone gets their foot in the door in libraries, and it's usually more pleasant than someone jumping to a new location or system, retiring, or dying.) So I'm one of an entire cohort of people being hired in full-time to the library system, and the timing on it is wonderful for me, because I haven't been out of library school for that long. Sure, it means packing up and traveling across several states, but I was planning on leaving my location at the time anyway because there were no positions open that would successfully pay a living wage and allow me to pay my student loans. We weren't really hired in to this system on the promise that we'd be bringing new ideas to branch out from the solid standards of public library service and to find new, innovative, and interesting ways of serving our population.
Further hindering the possibility of innovation sneaking in through the doors were that our staffing was set up where there was at least one Youth Services Librarian for all of the "large" locations (even though mine was currently working out of a converted auto parts store while the new, bigger, grander, integrated building was being built. It wouldn't be completed until four years into my tenure, and they only gave us a ground floor space, instead of recognizing the building they'd built was the library, and whatever else they were planning for city integration would have to be in a separate building entirely.) but only two librarians to handle all of the Teen Services across all of the locations. Now, technically, my remit as a Youth Services Librarian is birth to eighteen years of age (and handling their caregivers), so it was entirely possible that the cohort could be put to use helping the Teen Services librarians do teen-focused programming, but in practice, the expectation was that anything that required in-person-ness would be handled by the Teen Services librarians, and the rest of us could use kit programming if we wanted to (or occasionally help out for big projects that couldn't be done by the two of them.) It's only in the last five years that we've added more librarians and a cohort of specialists to build them out into a whole nine people, still handling programming across nineteen locations, despite it being a known thing that teens are library users, too, rather than pests needing discipline for the entire time that I've been employed in this system. (Not that this knowledge always translates into doing things well, because there's still a strong impulse in a lot of library workers and patrons that teenagers, especially, should never be heard or seen unless they're completely silent and working on their academics.)
So I come in hot with the idea that video game programming is going to be a good idea, and that it's going to bring in teenagers, who don't really have a space-as-such, but who are definitely looking for somewhere to be after school, and the game programming will pull them into the meeting room space (which, in this case, was also right next to the quiet reading area.) so they have a place where they can be supervised loud and it'll be great. At every turn, though, when I say these were successful programs that I saw in my last locations, the upper management wasn't interested. The teen librarians were, but they were already overworked. Since I was the spare librarian, sort of, and I didn't find teenagers inherently repugnant (I don't think any of my other youth services coworkers have, to be clear, but still, rolling the boulder uphill), I pretty well had decided to myself that I was a Teen Services Minion for when things needed getting done or programming needed implementing, and that I would be spending more of my time trying to build good teen relationships, while also handling my story time, school, and collection duties.
The games program worked spectacularly, even more so when the next Smash Brothers released and we played the absolute hell out of it for years. When we had unexpected dollars to help get some nice things for the new buildings, I suggested Nintendo DS systems. They were designated for in-branch use only, but they were extremely popular. When we swapped over to having the controllers for the Wii available for checkout, since the teen area got a screen, they circulated extremely well. (Much to the aggravation of some of my co-workers, who wanted something to be done about the volume problem from the teen area, and since the building's design flaws could not be corrected, that meant the problem was the teens.) Every single time I've gone in for gaming at my location, it's gone over well, but every single time I've done it, I've had to go through the Friends groups (who weren't going to argue with the receipts I was bringing), at least until the system finally decided they didn't like the idea of some locations having access to more financial and programming resources through their Friends groups and provided us all with programming and supply budgets. The pandemic-related shutdown of buildings and the accidental breaking of the teen area screen put a damper on the game programming, but even the small amount that I'm doing now is going well with the target audiences. Admittedly, now that we have a Teen Librarian in-location, I have been able to step down to actually being Minion, rather than the Teen Librarian in all but name, but for my career up through the shutdown, I did a lot of those things, including handling collection responsibilities in YA. (I didn't apply for the additional Teen Librarian positions because I like my story times too much. Minion is fine, honestly.)
So despite being able to show and show and show that this was a good direction to go in, there was a lot of complaining about noise, about kids and teens coming up at all hours to change programs or get controllers and make more work for desk staff, and how some of them were thrilled when the screen broke and there wasn't any more need to handle things, and then at the eventual retirement of the DS systems due to the pandemic shutdown. The systems that were in the Youth Services area saw very little use, since there weren't that many people interested in using them, and because they had to be picked up and returned to the central location, rather than being shippable in the delivery system. The Teen Librarian has made some rumblings about wanting to pick up video games as a circulating collection, which I think will be awesome, but which I also think will be met with fierce resistance at all levels, because carrying video games would then be admitting they're a legitimate form of expression, and that it might be worth investing some money into getting a circulating collection going. (The big concern that shows up is almost always "well, they're just going to get stolen anyway.") There's the more practical concerns about what systems to carry software for, but I expect a high degree of resistance to getting it off the ground because this library system is fundamentally conservative, and they don't want to do something that might make them stand out in any way.(And because we've supposedly been in "bridge" and "rebuilding" years while our upper management gets their shit sorted out and tried to build an organizational structure that doesn't bottleneck immediately and doesn't fall over in a stiff breeze or mild stress.)
In other matters, I also find myself running into barriers when I would like to suggest some changes. I will freely admit I have a technological bias, and that I would like this system to be more leading edge than it is with regard to technology and services offered, even as I realize that most of the users that we have are not going to be on the leading edge of any technology in their life, and are most likely going to be dealing with things that have been given to them by work or by relatives who are upgrading their own devices more toward the leading edge. In many of those situations, I am thwarted by the reality that because we can only pay public library salaries, we're only going to get public library IT people. It makes me think about how Google swooped in to Kansas City, did an entire digital infrastructure upgrade, and expected there to be way more technology adaptation and use than there turned out to be in the space. Here the Kansas City Library is, in 2022, promoting the Affordable Connectivity Program, pointing out that even though Google made Google Fiber available there ten years ago, it didn't put a dent in the number of people still using library internet access. The pandemic shutdowns made it abundantly clear in most communities as to who was going to do fine with the devices they had, and who needed significant supports to be able to do things like continue schoolwork over digital methods. And how many residents in those communities did not have home Internet access or did not have good enough home Internet access to handle a high-bandwidth situation like a videoconference for the school day. Many schools and libraries went at the problem by providing devices and hotspots for people to check out so they would have reliable Internet at home to do work and schooling. A fair number of libraries learned how to do programming online and maintain their connections with their communities. We did not offer hotspots and devices (honestly, it seemed like getting everyone in staff a computer and getting the VPN stabilized enough to use reliably was a big lift), and our virtual programming was mostly ad-hoc and performed by the people who were interested in doing so until it got through that it was going to be a while before we could open locations again, and then things got more organized. As soon as we started processing materials again, though, some of the virtual programming was curtailed. And then, when we reopened our doors, almost all of the rest of that programming was wiped out. We still do some virtual programming, for situations where, say, gathering a group of adventures would only be possible online, and virtual is often the way to get programming from farther away than we might normally look, but it seems like we have a lot of push to not do that much virtual any more, because we have the buildings open again and that's what's important. Much like other places, after demonstrating that we could do the thing, and do it pretty well, we're stuffing all of that back into the box as if it were a fun experiment that we are not going to speak of again. (Except in Teen services, where one of the things they went with "forgiveness before permission" as a guiding principle is still going extremely strong, even with interference to try and close it down or bring it under the strangling control of our marketers. Teen Services has all the receipts there, too, but I'm sure the pressure will ratchet up on them to close things down until it can't be ignored or the library makes them cut it loose.
As for loaning computers or hotspots out of the building, both of which are things I think we should do, that conservatism strikes again, even as other library systems around us have developed and implemented their versions of hotspot and device lending. We only lend laptops for only in-branch use, where the wireless is. We extended the range of our wireless networks to get to the parking lot in many places we owned, but we didn't then, and don't now, consider hotspot lending or even computer lending for outside the library. Some of that, I suspect, is still that our IT department is understaffed and overmatched to the amount of things they could be doing or that would be helpful for all of our experiences, staff and users alike, and has been for likely at least as long as I have been working at the space. Public library wages, public library people. Beyond that, however, situations such as that require a certain amount of being willing to accept that we may not have all the answers, but we have enough of them to move forward, and that often means that managers have to have their ducks in a row so that when an idea comes to them, they know what to do with it and can ask and answer good questions about it. Hotspot lending because it's a cool and trendy thing is not something that our library would engage with, unless someone high enough up the decision chain decided we wanted to do it, then we'd do it. Even with a formal Big Ideas plan for generating computer and hotspot combos that could be lent out from our locations, the people reviewing it had a fundamental misunderstanding of what was sought, thinking it was for installing some computers in a specific location with Internet access, rather than lending them out to the public. Once that was cleared up, the idea did not go any further in the process.
Maybe it's that my ideas are not easily understandable? All I have at the moment is anecdata, because I don't know where the real data could be, but it seems to me that our library users are usually in for printing things off, browsing the web, watching multimedia, and doing document work. All of which could theoretically be achieved without having to pay for site licenses for Windows machines, even if we get them at a deep discount. There are all programs that can do this, and do so with reasonable compatibility with Windows programs like Microsoft Office. So I would like to know what the savings are if we swapped all of our Windows desktops for Linux. Possibly even the laptops, too. I know there are effective remote administration tools for Linux machines, and it might produce a security improvement if we switched and then made some decisions about hardening and securing the machines more. It would require having people learn how to sysadmin Linux machines, but that could be trained or hired out for. Although I don't know at what cost.
Staff machines could probably also go in that direction - there are a few programs that are much friendlier to Windows that we use that we might have to find alternatives for, or swap from using the application version of the system to a web-based version of it (which our ILS just turned on in the latest update), or use a different application to access the same server and data. We'd probably have to find another single sign-on solution to replace something like Active Directory. Or we might have to provision a fairly small number of Windows or Mac machines because an essential program for a department doesn't have an effective Linux equivalent. But that seems much more cost-efficient in hardware and the length of being able to use and keep the hardware updated. I don't know if the salaries we'd need to offer for the administrators of the servers and machines would eat those savings and possibly more, but I really am curious and would like to see a library system actually do a full conversion and see where the pain points are and whether there are things that really do require some other operating system to use for library operations. (What probably kills this idea before it can get started is the sheer scale of the possible operation, and all of the things that would have to be thought up and implemented and refined and otherwise made ready for primetime. It would absolutely have to be something that had a sign-off from people very high in the organization and to make sure there was enough capacity in IT to get it done. And because it would be a radical change and our organization really does not like radical change.
So I basically don't suggest big things like that any more, not unless I think the actual people involved would be receptive to it. Like how I don't suggest that we should partner with some organization where they buy the technology and make it friendly for use, and then we find ways of giving it away to the people who need it. So not just low-cost (although we can promote that, too), but gratis machines that might be the difference between being able to afford some connectivity along with the machine or having nothing. Having spent enough time absorbing how things are actually done and what processes need to be followed, and who needs to sign off on it, and knowing just how much the correct attitude to take is "forgiveness rather than permission" with anything that you can do yourself or with a low number of co-conspirators, I sometimes say that I'll put in a ticket, but I don't expect any results. I just recently filed a ticket asking for all of our work machines to offer Firefox instead of Chrome as the browser, because of Chrome's impending changes to make adblocking harder and the necessity of good adblocking against malvertising appearing in search engine results. I formatted it correctly so that it would get sent to the correct teams for their evaluation. And after filing the ticket, I basically forgot about it, because I'm pretty sure it's not going to go anywhere. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it does.
This is not a happy story, because it's basically a story of failure and blockading and a neurodivergent person looking at things, having a possible solution, asking if we can implement it, and being told "no" for reasons that don't always end up in the "okay, that's fair" column. And that's with things that I've been trying to do that are ultimately on the less important end, because there are other possible ways of obtaining technology or putting in programming. For the people who have been trying to get the organization to change their culture to be better at providing good working environments for non-white colleagues, for non-cis colleagues, they not only have to deal with the fundamental conservatism, but all of the additional problems that come from dealing with a profession that is primarily white women, and with a lot of white women in positions of leadership. They probably have long since stopped believing in the statement that they can make change entirely. Yet nobody seems to think of that as the major condemnation that it is.
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Date: 2023-12-11 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 01:29 pm (UTC)I am having flashbacks to my year (96-97) working as a library page. (Is that a standard title in library sciences? We were the minimum wage people putting the returns back out on the shelves.)
Back then our City Librarian F____ was adamant on keeping the paper-based card catalog and slow walking anything digital because she didn't like computers. When she finally retired her replacement D____ got rid of the card catalog, and made it more like its peer libraries. D____ ran the library for 20ish years, and then was a "leader" person at an anti-reproductive-health "pregnancy center". 🙄
It's weird how people with such terrible views on some things still manage to keep the blessed community space going. Even my current library, by far the nicest Big City Suburb I have ever encountered, with lovely people working the desks and bookmobile and a maker space and teen area and on and on, has a terrible work culture on the backend such that one job interview was all it took for my spouse to never apply again.
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Date: 2023-12-11 04:38 pm (UTC)Terrible views in libraries is a relatively common thing, because it's still a profession that hews to Melvil Dewey's twin ideas that library workers should be women because you can underpay women and demand they be pleasant all the time and their husbands will provide the real money and let them leave when they like, and that libraries have the job of teaching "civilization" to the Poors and the Blacks and the immigrants while they're providing services, so select your staff people on how well they can get others to do the job of advancing white culture.
Most libraries would deny that they're still running on those principles, but then you look at the demographics and you look at what are supposedly the professional ethics and values, and you pick up pretty quickly that they haven't gotten rid of them, they're just hiding them.
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Date: 2023-12-12 12:04 am (UTC)It's not better in academic libraries. +wry+
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Date: 2023-12-12 12:13 am (UTC)