Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

Two things, both libraries, no waiting. Skip if you like, stay on if you want.

The Organization is going out for a levy lid lift this year. Given that it's been twelve years since the last one, we've been pretty due to go to the voters to ask if we can assess our full levy for a year. The plan is to do it for one year, then use some of the excess monies collected from that one-time lift to make five years of normal operations happen as supplementation to the actual revenues we would collect normally. This wouldn't be necessary, except that an anti-tax faction got a initiative passed that says that taxing districts can only collect 1% more in revenues from what they received last year, regardless of the increase in costs for that entity. So every so often, public institutions have to ask the voters to fund them adequately so that can do their jobs. And have to pay the state for the privilege of doing so, to cut down on the number of frivolous petitions to the government for such things.

If the vote fails, the budget as it is likely to be will result in less open hours and the likely shuttering of two or three of our locations, in addition to reductions in acquisition.

This is all information that I can provide, because it is factual and it does not advocate for a position, because according to the watchdog entity regarding elections, when I'm at work, as part of work, or using work resources, I'm not allowed to advocate for (or against) the thing that will make it possible for my work and workplace to continue delivering services. Because that would be improper use of taxpayer monies and resources.

Because it's improper of me to take any stand on any issue or support any partisan while I'm at work, regardless of what positions they hold and, y'know, whether my work and job itself might be at stake if the voters don't approve the levy. I'm supposed to make sure that I don't identify myself as a member of The Organization if I talk about it as a private citizen, because that's improper. Which isn't to say I can't find a way of making my point incredibly clear, and The Organization will do the same in the materials they produce or accept on the matter, but I'm not actually allowed to say "you should vote for this if you want to keep using the library as you are accustomed to doing." The law says taxpayer monies can't be expended to advocate for partisan concerns. Everyone is entitled to information so that they can make up their own minds.

Even if we weren't forbidden from advocacy by the law, I suspect that our organization would have a policy in place telling us we couldn't do it, anyway, on the grounds that the library is supposed to remain politically neutral and not take sides in any manner. This venerated idea of neutrality is impossible to achieve, given that decisions are being made about acquisition, de-acquisition, display, behavior, and a horde of other things in every library every single day, to the benefit of some and the detriment of others. But librarians like to kid themselves that they can get close or even achieve this mythical neutrality and so strive for it.

Which then erupts into a proper firestorm when The American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom explicitly adds hate groups as a group that has to be allowed into meeting rooms on the idea of nondiscrimination of resources. It's not binding, in the sense that every library now has to adhere to it, but it is apparently their preferred interpretation, because neutrality and nonpartisanship.

Cue campaign asking for reconsideration of the added language in the interpretation, on the idea that such groups, seeing themselves explicitly welcomed into library spaces, will proceed to do exactly that and drive out others who also have a right to use the library, but won't, because they fear their safety.

At least one of the councilors noted that the new language was inserted in between when one version was reviewed and when it needed to be passed at the annual meeting, at a session that was out of the way and not very well attended.

The office responsible said that they don't endorse hate speech, but neither are they backing down on what was said, because they supposedly want libraries not to get sued over denial of meeting room privileges. As one might guess, the inclusion of the language likely will cause an increase, rather than a decrease, in lawsuits.

The head of the office involved claimed people were speaking before getting all the facts and information, which is a fairly standard response when you've been caught flat-footed and wrong on something.

This is not just a question of laws, but one of ethics, and we should be able to walk legally and chew our ethical gum at the same time, and perhaps even prioritize the safety of the people in our libraries over an intellectual exercise that is actively harmful to those same people. I have a policy at The Organization that says I am to stop any behavior that interferes with the enjoyment or use of the library by others, or that interferes with the operation of the library by library staff. If you think that white supremacist and hate groups being in the library isn't going to fall afoul of that policy, you have another think coming, especially in my library, where they will find plenty or potential targets to harass and will eat staff time in dealing with them, or dealing with the fallout of their presence.

If you're asking me to make my library less safe for everyone, in contravention of stated and passed policies of The Organization itself, so that you can worship at the altar of neutrality, I'm going to tell you go get lost. In as colorful a way as I can get away with.

Libraries. Are. Not. Neutral.
When a core tenet of your profession is used to justify the presence of hate groups and white supremacists, that tenet needs revision or excision.

We can strive for comprehensive, relevant, factual information to our communities and to put as broad a swath of perspectives as we can manage in front of them in the materials that we select and the programs that we present or collaborate with. (Which, yes, will mean having some utterly repugnant perspectives, because the best way of understanding your enemy is by reading their work and analyzing it. But we also then give people the choice of avoiding that material and choosing something else. With people, it doesn't work that way.) All of that, though, is secondary to making sure that our library is a place that *everyone* can and wants to use. That means exclusion of voices that make the space unsafe. That means inclusion of voices that struggle to be heard in other forums, or that have difficulty in being published, and making an effort to find those voices where we can. That's exercising our professional ethics and skills, which is what we are charged with doing as library workers.

As plenty of people with marginalized identities could tell us, though, a lack of expertise is no barrier to people telling you that they can do your job better than you. What's really galling is when the people who should know better show off just how little they actually know. So being good professionals at our jobs also means listening when marginalized people tell us we're doing it wrong, if they give us the courtesy of doing so. And then fixing it. Repeatedly, if necessary. At every point of learning how to be a professional, putting that learning into practice, and teaching the next generation how to do the same.

The paradox of tolerance is something we have already seen the bad end of. Learn from the mistakes of the past, and avoid repeating them. (Seems simple. Should be simple. Isn't, apparently.)

[Hey, look, it's a bonus entry! This is definitely one of the things I wasn't aware of in library school, for reasons that will become apparent soon enough.]

A very clear example of vocational awe, as applied to the librarian, in the form of a poem by Peg Johsnson, a retiring librarian on the Office of Intellectual Freedom blog. The order of the poem is first about the books, and then about the curation of resources, and then about the fact that librarians help people bridge gaps in their learning with regard to technology and the increasing digitization of everything. After all that comes the privacy part, which OIF would be most interested in. But I'm going to quote the last two stanzas, because there's where all that awe comes into play most clearly.

Walk into a library and you can feel
The sacredness of this secular space
Available to you for the asking,
With librarians as the guides for the curious and the willing.

Walk into a library and think about who makes all that happen?
Those little girls and boys don't scream librarian
But they might if they knew that librarians, aren't the stereotypes,
No, librarians are actually the champions of knowledge, keepers of secrets,
And fearless warriors for freedom.

That's a pretty good example of the vocational awe idea. Libraries become sacred space, as part of a profession that seems mysterious and not all that well-known, or necessarily that prestigious, but it does all of those important things that people need. And the poem itself starts with the books, that terrible contradiction of what everyone knows the library for and what might be, arguably, the least important thing in the library when compared to things like privacy and assistance in finding relevant information and putting on free classes to help with technological divides. Even as librarians, we can't necessarily let go of the past well enough to be able to embrace our future roles. The sort of thing that Hi, Miss Julie talks about when describing the emotional labor of librarianship - very important things, but also things that have very gendered expectations and understanding (or lack thereof as to who is doing the labor and who is benefiting from it. Vocational awe often concentrates and ampllifes all of those demands, and doesn't necessarily provide any sort of meaningful way of recharging your reserves, either.

The meat of the post, though, is instead about these linked posts from In The Library With The Lead Pipe, "an open access, open peer reviewed journal" that likes to talk about things that probably don't make it into more prominent or more mainstream publications, such as Library Journal. Some of the "name withheld" letters in those publications do talk about issues in the profession - the May 02018 letters section had a white man grumbling about how everything these days turns up to be "patriarchy" or "racism" or other such things and that if people of color and women were doing more harm than good to the cause of gathering allies by constantly talking about these problems. I think they'd stop talking about it so much if actual progress were being made on the matter.

The posts are separate, but their topic is linked, and it's about diversity, inclusion, and the requirements that a member of a marginalized group have to go through to appear sufficiently White to be considered for a position. Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship is an interrogation of the hiring process and what librarianship states as both requirements and preferences for the job. Unsurprisingly, those requirements reflect White, generally cis, capitalist, middle class values.

(The article doesn't specifically mention this, but it might be taking as granted that a person reading the article knows that the biggest stonking requirement of this nature is the Master's degree for entry-level librarian positions, which requires that a prospective librarian have sufficient privilege to make it to college, pass college, then go to graduate school and pass that first. And then essentially be able to stick with the profession for at least ten years to either take advantage of loan forgiveness or to pay back the cost of all that college, while being underpaid for your work (because vocational awe). The article points out that negotiating for a good salary is likely to leave you without a job. Furthermore, there's not usually a path to start as a page and work your way up to the librarian position through experience, possibly taking a couple classes along the way to fill in gaps of your knowledge that you won't get through working in a library.)

Librarianship, much like technology, tends to be oriented toward the idea that a lack of diversity in the profession is a problem with a discrete solution and that you can throw sufficient resources at it through the use of diversity scholarships, fellowships, and the like to make it attractive for marginalized people to join. If there's all those resources out there, we reason, and people aren't taking advantage of them, then there must not be enough quality people available.

That cake is a lie. White Librarianship In Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS helps explain why.

Scholarship programs aren't enough, because, again, like the tech field, you can recruit all the people you like, but if you them put them in a toxic environment, there's no way they're going to stick around long enough to be helpful to anyone. The librarians of color need to not be mistaken for library assistants, the librarians outside the binary need gender-neutral bathrooms, and people need library jobs that are actually close to them, rather than having to chase jobs to whatever state happens to be providing enough funding that a library system can hire new librarians.

(This is tough to do, the article notes, when the entirety of the profession of librarianship has been very specifically about inculcating and spreading the values of White culture to all the non-white people.)

Both articles come to the same conclusion - libraries do their thing like tech does: lots of focus on quantity without any look at quality.

Getting back to the matter of a degree, the second point in Soliciting Performance is that the degree is really only the beginning point of pain for plenty of marginalized applicants. If an applicant went the route of a cheaper (or better-fitting their schedule) distance-learning program, rather than attending in person, search committees often fine them to be less of a librarian or unable to do team-based activities, even though their qualifications are the same and their coursework is presumably sufficiently rigorous to receive accreditation from the ALA. (And the distance learners that I know of had to go in person to a campus and work with other people on group assignments at least once a month anyway.) Plus, as the article points out, there's a lot of distance learning that happens after you get hired anyway.

The practicum is a major component of library education. Go out and get experience in the ways that libraries actually work, the student is told. Now that I've been in the profession for a little while, I think the real lesson from the practicum is "go out into the world and see how all the things you're learning in school aren't going to apply in the ways they teach in school." Because, as the December Days series takes as its premise, there's a lot that I didn't learn in library school.

The problem with the practicum is that for most students, the libraries around them are only accepting unpaid students for getting their necessary experience. If you don't already have income, or you don't have the privilege of being able to spend a semester or five working at the library for no actual pay, then you're stuck from getting to be a librarian.

After the problem with the practicum, Soliciting Performance also talks about the matter of the "profesional wardrobe." Yes, Librarian Wardrobe exists to show off the ways that one can do a lot, but much of that is already-hired librarians with latitude to show their style after they've made it through the process of librarianship. My first manager was absolutely insistent that jeans were not sufficiently proessional wear for a librarian, and that slacks were the minimum requirement. Which meant a quick emergency expenditure for new clothes. Thankfully, I had the means for that, but I can see a lot of people who couldn't afford that. I agree with the article that if you have to edeal with search committees that have a specific idea in mind of what a "professional" looks like, then someone is expending limited resources of time and money to try and match that idea. That requires greater outlays for people with marginalized identities, and they have to do more to hide their genuine selves to match the expectations of the likely-white women search committee. Or people reframe their experiences to make themselves fit a White Savior narrative, so that the seach committee can feel like the profession of librarianship has saved someone from an otherwise cruel fate as a minority.

That even happened at the PLA conference this year - one of the guests, Steve Pemberton, framed the library as the place that treated him like a person, when everyone else, including his foster family, treated him as a nothing, and with that, he was able to get a leg up and go from there. That's the kind of narrative a librarian likes to hear, because of the savior narratives. (Also, because so very few of the people that we help ever come back to tell us what happened.)

LIS Blackface has a list of what it takes for someone to get into one of the possibly diversity scholarship or fellowship programs: an application form, a resume, an essay, a letter of acceptance to an accredited program, official transcripts from all their previous college, and also two letters of recommendation, one of which has to be from an employer or a professor. The article points out that all of this assumes that your experience is with a single name and gender identity, only work experience that easily and directly translates to the program's requirements, and a sufficiently personable relationship with employers or professors that you can ask someone to personaly recommend you to the program. If you don't have that, then it assumes you have the skills to make your experience (and yourself) look like you do have the background that they're looking for.

But even when hired, librarianship follows many of the same problems tha tech does - the minority librarian is assigned to the committee of people that is trying to make diversity better in the library, because they have the lived experience and are visibly being minority in a white profession. The article notes, though, that the lived experience tends to get ignored when it comes to soliciting and hiring. Marginalized students coming to college tend to get framed as needing White Saviors to help them succeed where they could not on their own, and that framing extends out to libraries themselves, where the mostly white librarians do heroic (vocationally awesome) work helping the patrons of color achieve what they cannot do on their own. You can guess what adjectives might be attached to those same marginalized patrons in this narrative. Since the narrative fails to provide a space for marginalized patrons to see themselves as librarians, the article notes, they tend not to become librarians. When libraries further hide behind the idea that they are neutral spaces, they compound the problem by centering and normalizing white culture such that anyone who doesn't have that identity (and doesn't know how to perform it) gets pushed out, even if nobody is actively being an -ist to them. And search committees in librarianship will use the same dodges that those in technology do - "bad culture fit," for example.

The suggested improvements for making things better from here in both articles are things like: pay people for their work, or at least their professional development activities, let them do the work that you hired them for (including giving them the freedom to do the work, unencumbered by terrible policies around IT or administrations that don't understand anymore), figure out what you want from your interviews and then screen out bad questions, unchallenged vague responses like "bad culture fit," and people who seem to wield inordinate influence over the process, be flexible on the times of your internship offerings, and allow marginalized people to do work other than diversity committees. If they do want to serve, listen to them and take their suggestions on how to make things better.

And provide ways of feedback that don't require someone to disclose their lived experiences just so that someone will take them seriously. My own organization still doesn't really understand how to implement and maintain a robust and anonymous feedback loop that would really help them improve on the 101-level things they're being asked to do. Mentorship programs are a good way to help marginalized students get ahead by having contacts and having someone who's in the profession who can help them and provide them with references and resources. (Really, getting some allyship going would be very helpful.)

There's a lot that I've been learning about how things go in libraries, and the greater scope of the profession and the things that it has been doing as a history. None of which was really covered in school.

That can also shake your confidence, though. I went into the profession not entirely sure that anyone erally wanted to hire me for anything. (Yes, degree. But degree is not experience is not actually having anything to talk about other than coursework and many rejections already happening.) Partially because I wasn't sure anyone wanted to hire someone with my gender presentation for the job I was looking for.

Many years later, one of the people who was at my hiring interview said that the organization hired me on the strength of my storytelling. The more that I read and see things about the history of the institution, and the problems therein with marginalized identities, I begin to wonder whether the accumulated privilege of being me was a bigger factor in my getting hired than any skill I brought to the interview. That there may very well have been a much more qualified person for that job, but they didn't have the things that I did to get it. And there are plenty of other people around who would be fantastic at the profession, but the barriers to entry are so high that it's not even in their consideration.

That's the thing about institutions - they seem so large and indomitable and entirely not going to do anything at all in response to you, but you chip away at them in what way you can, (when that effort is being directed in productive ways) and at some point, there is actual change. Best I can do at this point is to stay willing to educate myself and to apply my efforts where they will do good. (And stop doing it if it turns out to not be good.)

And some of that comes from being a mid-career librarian - I got rattled early on by a terrible manager and basically went into hiding for a significant amount of time. I missed out on opportunitites because I was afraid of losing my job. I didn't have mentors available to me to not just keep me oriented in the right direction, but to have someone to bounce ideas off of.

So, yeah. I didn't learn how to do any of this, and not much of what I have learned about it has come from the people I work with or the mainstreamn publications. It's been you, all of you, being who you are, with the identities that you have, that give me insight into things I won't experience, how bureaucracy and institutions affect you, and what sort of places I should be reading more of what they're putting out.

If only I knew then what I know now...

The definition of diplomacy, as hanging in a space I frequent, is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip. That's certainly not the way this entry is going to go, although there is an art form to keeping your professional head when there's someone calling you and everyone else around you the derogatory term for a gay man among other several colorful imprecations and threats of violence, as happened to a coworker today.

Since that's the lead, let's start with the Temple Public Library fielding complaints from a group named Concerned Christian Citizens that their displays of LGBT books and information was advocating for a viewpoint, and libraries should not do that.

To accept that there is a debate on this issue, you have to accept the underpinning idea that one can choose to be LGBT in the same way that one can choose to be a Christian. This is clearly the case from the group making the complaint, as they provide the clear dog-whistle of an "agenda" being promoted in a taxpayer-funded library and that there needs to be balance of viewpoints such that the library remains natural.

The library neutrality argument is a canard at best, given that the institution of librarianship doesn't have a track record of being neutral, and that neutrality is functionally impossible anyway.

The best points made in the article are in subsequent paragraphs, but I'm going to reorder them to make the most sense. Mr. Hall says "By allowing the display, the library unintentionally endorsed these ideas and beliefs."

Nothing unintentional about it, Mr. Hall - we're "professionals and [...] require a professional level of training to carry out [our] duties." So you don't get to paint us as flighty-headed people who, oh gosh, now that you've shown us how we endorsed it, of course we pull them down because we don't want to endorse anything, much less LGBT folk. Grab a ticket, line's that way, past the abyss of Go Fuck Off. We have LGBT people in our community, they have just as much right to use the library and to have themselves represented in the collection and on displays.

Mr. Blair makes an even better point about endorsement. "The state, county, and cities recognized Confederate heroes a week and a half ago. Does that recognition advocate armed rebellion, treason or slave holding? Of course not." We respectfully disagree on the endorsement point there, given the track record of people who do hold Confederate values, and those same values themselves, but that's not the focus here. Mr. Blair's point is that, generally speaking, nobody accuses the public library of holding Nazi beliefs because we have a translated copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf on the shelves, or of military fetishism because we have entire sections of fiction and nonfiction devoted to military matters, or of being partisan hacks because we carry books written by members of the other political party. It only seems to be a problem when the library is seen as saying that people who don't look like you, or don't love like you, or don't believe like you are also people who deserve to be recognized, protected, and served like you. You know, when we're trying to be the neutral you seem to want us to be. Which suggests people who claim there's an "agenda" that needs balance not only don't see other people as human, what they want the library to do is help enforce power structures and ideas that benefit the perceived majority that believe they deserve that power. Instead of being a truly public institution.

Because they're taxpayers, or future taxpayers, too.

Second, Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give was pulled from curricular usage after a parent objected to the content and that they hadn't been given the option to pull their permission for a child to read the book. Now, when people make complaints about the library, like the ones above, they're usually expressing a sentiment that boils down to "you are not living up to the ideal of the library that I have in my head, for reasons X, Y, Zed." For things like that, we can talk about whether the ideal itself is flawed, what the ideal picture has for assumptions as its support structures, and whether or not that ideal is one that comes in conflict with the ideal that the library holds for itself. There's space for a conversation. And for the practice of the fine art of diplomacy.

This act right here does not. It is the story of thing that would make an educator see red, because it's a parent asserting they know more about what is appropriate for their and every child than the educator with the professional training, and then getting a politician involved in the matter so as to put pressure on the school to do whatever is needed to get the pressure off rather than following procedures or taking their time to evaluate tuner material. That same educator that is being told they have to prepare their students for the world after school, but is apparently not allowed to do so in any way that might actually signal what the world outside school is like. The contract of schooling is that someone agrees to give up control of what is taught to the professionals in exchange for not having to do the schooling themselves. I assure you, dearest parents, that a book about a child witnessing police violence, that contains coarse language and that talks about the ways in which children emulate the sexualized imagery they've seen in society without fully understanding what they are doing is utterly appropriate for middle school, given that the average middle schooler may have already witnessed and heard all of those things in one form or another by middle school. Depending on where they are, possibly multiple times. There are parents that will demand their children not be exposed to those things, but they should be exceptions granted with compelling reasons. If the material would be triggering for the child, certainly. If the parent doesn't want to acknowledge the real world, forget it. They can, instead, do the work of engaging with their child, offering their own views and having discussions with their charge, and treating them and the educator that chose the work with respect. Most teachers aren't going to choose works for shock value, or to shove something in front of a child just to see their reactions. There's thought that goes into curricula, and I'll bet the book was chosen for several very good academic reasons. To have their crafted curriculum be derailed by a parent who didn't seem interested in letting the school process play out has to be frustrating.

I hope the local public librarian, and the school librarian, if there is one, on hearing about this, got all their copies of The Hate U Give that were available in and then put them in display, nice and face-out in a very prominent place, top get the point across that even if a student is forbidden a thing in class, there are plenty of other places where the thing can be obtained. And then the parent has to parent anyway. So why not just skip to that step? Keeping kids out of the coursework on human maturation doesn't stop them from finding information about sex, and it poisons any possibility of conversation about the matter as well, because their parents have already demonstrated an unwillingness to talk. At that point, or any other point where censorship is the option demanded, you're left hoping the kids have enough good information skills to find reliable and reputable information on their own. Or that they have other trusted adults to have those conversations with.

The time is gone where a person can hope that by shutting off avenues, information can be stymied or forgotten. Censorship is perceived as damaged nodes in the network and routed around, even if it requires a few more hops. The best someone can hope for is that the cost of obtaining the information becomes too high for it to be pursued. Even then, that might only be delaying the inevitable. As soon as someone gets access to the unfiltered world, it becomes up to them to decide what they seek. As a parent, it seems your time would be better spent developing their capacities than censoring their inquiries.

But what do I know? I'm just a professional with a degree and training in information and the ways that people seek it out. Since I'm not a parent, I can't possibly understand. And library school certainly didn't teach me how to be a parent.

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. It's been a hoot doing these, and thank you for your suggestions.]

You have probably noticed at this point that a public library is a walking contradiction. It's an entity that has to be both conservative and progressive, the long tail to make sure everyone is able to catch up and far enough on the edge that there's something new and exciting to learn for all of the people that come in. We are bound by taxation laws and able to seek funding from various community organizations and private-sector partnerships (mostly through the foundations that we have or our Friends groups, because those laws and rules are pretty strict about stuff.) Our target market is our community, from the smallest younglings to the wisest of elders, the richest and the poorest alike. Yet we band together, each of us, in associations at county, state, national, and international levels to advocate for ourselves and our communities to those who do not understand them well, if at all, and yet control their fate just as surely. We are the "people's university," with all of the messy socialist liberal ideals that entails, and yet we are increasingly restricted and constrained in our ability to provide knowledge to others by the encroachment of intellectual property and copyright laws bent to serve the moneymaking interests of corporations ad infinitum instead of acknowledging the limited monopoly was meant to drive innovation and that no company should be able to just infinitely iterate on a crap product and have everyone purchase it because while it's not a monopoly legally, they're the ones providing a captive audience for others.

The public library itself is difficult to change, as well, as a whole. There's a certain reluctance to leave the things that we have essentially built our brand on - the availability of print materials to people without cost for their information and education. Print is still generally the biggest footprint in a library. There are certain reasons for that - print is relatively durable and inexpensive to obtain, as opposed to the exorbitant amount of money we will pay for licenses to use ebooks that can be and are revoked after limited uses or at arbitrary times and reasons. Because we have print, and because we still see our target audiences as print-readers, libraries as a whole have been slow to advocate for the ability to actually own materials, instead of just renting them from vendors. We've also been slow about getting things like the First Sale Doctrine to apply to electronic products as well, so that instead of being sold a license to use a piece of software that can come with conditions of use, we actually own the thing and can do what we want with it, including selling it to someone else, letting them borrow it, reverse-engineering it to see if we can use it for something else or to figure out how it ticks, and the like. So long as the Copyright Office is under the jurisdiction of the Librarian of Congress, it's entirely possible that we could petition them to make sensible exceptions, like the ones that allowed you to gain superuser access to a mobile device so that you could put the software of your choice on it, instead of being solely limited to whatever your device carrier's sandbox, if you wanted to take that risk. If we weren't being limited in our choices by what we can do with licensing and DRM, then we would be able to potentially move every library out of a locked-in ecosystem and save ourselves a significant amount of money while increasing choice and freedom. (Isn't that what at least one wing of politics here in the States is theoretically about?)

Things can be difficult to make change even at the organizational level. That program I did with games in my branch? Was because I couldn't really gather enough support in the library system to do it all across the way. At least some part of that was because I was a new person in the library system, coming in with ideas and change thoughts, and I got the normal response to someone coming in with change thoughts to an old institution: "That's nice, child, come back and see us again when you've gotten a few years under your belt." It's a waste of a precious resource to force your newcomers to learn who the actual powerbrokers are in your organization, the process by which things really get done, and that they won't actually be listened to until they've been in the system long enough for anyone to pay attention to them. The reason that I started documenting and then sharing my documentation about how things work in my corner of things was because I got continually frustrated about aspects of my work that should have worked and didn't, or those aspects of my work that were only occasional, slightly convoluted, but would absolutely result in things going wrong or being called to the carpet a bit if they were done incorrectly. That document is laced with as much snark and comedy as I can get away with putting in it because I want to signal to anyone who reads it that the organization they are part of is the kind of organization that will frustrate you if you assume that it functions like any other kind of organization you are familiar with.

Or, sometimes, that it functions at all. In ten years of being with the organization, the only method that officially exists of getting communication between front-line staff and higher management is to go through one's branch supervisor, who then gets to decide whether to send it on to the people above them and in what form it goes there. If you have a supervisor that's actively working against you, though, or who is a problem that needs to be fixed or routed around, there's no way of flagging this up to the people above you. HR is a crapshoot at best, an active collaborator in making the problem worse at worst. The union can take action on your behalf in specific circumstances, but it's usually going to require exhaustive documentation. There's no channel for direct communication with upper management short of having the courage to go directly to them and tell them about what's going on, which is a no-go if you're not completely sure something good will come out of it and there won't be any retaliation, subtle or otherwise, for having had the temerity to go around your supervisor.

We have had people quit the organization over persistent deadnaming and misgendering by a supervisor, as well as comments that clearly made that place unsafe to work at. But the organization as a whole is having trouble with adapting to this new reality - suggestions to add pronoun spaces on name tags have to be suggested to exactly the right person, who gets to decide whether or not they get implemented because that's their fiefdom and the uniformity of branding and communication might be more important than allowing people to signal what kind of space the library is. I sat a committee this year that was specifically commissioned to find out why library employees had only okay morale, as reported by an outside study group that talked to us. We gathered lots of information about why people had low morale - how we treat substitutes was one of the big ones. A disconnection between staff that work in the administrative center and staff that work on the front lines was also a big one - front-line staff had the general opinion that the people working in the administrative building didn't have enough of a clue about how branch operations went to be able to create effective policy, when designing procedures on how to handle materials, or to provide the necessary backup for branch staff when they had to use their judgment calls when "in charge." We recommended more and more visible visits by the upper management to the branches so the front-line staff would feel like their managers were actually present in their lives.

We recommended the library train all staff, including the substitutes, on the realities of our new world, beyond just "you're serving a diverse population and your personal prejudices or thoughts on the matter aren't allowed to come into play." Because for a lot of people with marginalized identities, if we're not affirmatively signaling we're good people and then backing it up by being good people when nobody appears to be looking, we're not going to be the place they go for support and help, even if we have the resources that could help them a lot. We did a lot of recommending things that we thought were powerful but achievable changes in the organization, the kinds of things that could be implemented yesterday.

We asked for formal direct communication channels that we could use if we had suggestions or issues with the library and its operations, the kind that would guarantee a response from the people in upper management if they were used and had names attached to them.

We got blown off, to put it kindly. The upper management gave back about two pages worth of response to our presentation and data, all of which had the same tune to it. "We're glad to have heard from you on these matters. We're already doing the things that you're suggesting, so we don't feel like we have to expend any extra effort to address your concerns." If the organization were doing enough to address those concerns, they would not still be concerns and we wouldn't be bringing them before you. There's still only one official way of getting something to get put before someone in upper management. There are lots of unofficial ways, often the kind that include being in the same place and having a hallway conversation, something that a person who travels to the administrative center on the regular might be able to do, but that the people who don't will be denied the opportunity to become more visible and more personally able to talk. This is another reason why I have The Agreement - I have the ability to place issues and suggestions in the laps of people higher-up because I can see them more often and in more informal settings than anyone at a lower classification than me. I can put words in ears and see what happens. I shouldn't have to use this power this way, because everyone should have a way of making suggestions that get listened to.

Library school does not teach you about playing politics in your own organization. It can't help you figure out how to spot the people who actually get things done and to route suggestions through them, or get them on your side if you want a decision to go your way. It doesn't teach you the ways of asking for redress, of pointing out flaws in such a way that someone takes them seriously, or of getting your organization to move, however slowly, in the right direction to position them to be in a good space when the future you can see coming arrives. Library school wants you to believe that good ideas find their way to the right people by virtue of being good ideas - a very Gryffindor sentiment, but organizations are full of people, and people require Slytherins and Hufflepuffs to make things happen. I want to tell you so very badly that the public library is an institution that is well-positioned to adapt to changes in the world and can move swiftly to meet the challenges of the future, but if I did, I would be lying to you in at least some degree. How big or small that lie is depends on the organization that's being talked about in the specific, but most organizations don't have the structures, programs, and ideas in place that make them able to grapple with fast-moving issues, trends, or ideas, and have the ability to discern which among them is going to be ones to pay more attention to. Branches and locations can get away with some things at their local levels, but systematic change is difficult if it's not initiated at the highest levels and given the full backing of those levels to get implemented. We often waste our most precious resources by telling them they have to learn how the organization actually functions before we'll listen to them, or by discounting that they could have any sort of good idea for the system by virtue of being new to it. Or that they're just substitutes.

Or even just by saying that this kind of person can become a librarian. Requiring graduate school to become a fully-fledged librarian, even if you have plenty of experience doing the library things, is a barrier to allowing more people to become librarians. Which limits your pool of people in the library field who can speak up and say "you're not serving people like me because you don't have people like me in your profession." As a whole, the library profession took its time figuring out that -isms are bad and that the best way to ensure survival and relevance is to be able to serve all the people in the community. We're on track to be making that mistake again, just with some additional -isms thrown in for good measure.

Library school did teach me a lot of things, but it's only with experience that I realize what library school taught were foundations - beginning blocks to build upon, techniques to use, the parts of the profession you need to have as a bare minimum to do the job. The parts that make me effective at my work are all things that I've had to learn on the job, and a lot of them are specific to the place where I work. What kind of lovely world would it be where people just coming out of library school had the tools to be maximally effective wherever they were posted, and where people who have already gained the insight into their communities could then be given the tools to do the rest of the work to build programming and collections that would serve those communities well? What kind of place would we have if it were a rule, instead of an exception, that there were clear lines of communication, with guarantees of reply, so that everyone in the organization felt like they had a voice in its running? What kind of place would we have where the library gave as much thought to what was going outside of the buildings as what went inside them?

Creating change doesn't have to be as hard as we're making it. Here's hoping that in the next year, we can start moving faster in the direction that makes the public library indispensable to everyone, by being relevant, welcoming, and active in our communities.

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

redsixwing wanted to know what thing I use all the time in the library profession. Which, essentially, would be one of those things I did learn in library school, because I was paying attention. But much like the thing I never use, there is a very specific set of skills that I had to pick up on the job, even though the foundation of those skills is something that's at the bedrock of every reference interaction and something that they won't let you out of library school until you've learned how to do it.

In library school, there is a course you will take on how to give The Reference Interview. Or at least a section of one of your courses that will cover this essential topic. Because it is a truth of the library world that the first question or statement a person gives when interacting with you is incomplete. The question itself may be grammatically correct, a complete sentence, and otherwise coherent in syntax. But it often lacks the information needed to fully understand and help a person. "Where are your childrens' books [because I'm trying to find The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe]?" "I need a guest pass [so I can check all the job boards and see if there's been anything new, as well as deal with the unemployment insurance bureaucracy]." "Can you help me find a book [that I need for my class and don't want to have to spend an exorbitant amount of money on]?"

And so forth. It's not that people are deliberately trying to hide things from us. Except on sensitive subjects - people get hung up on asking us where they can find books about sex, relationships, self-harm and the like, because it's really hard to ask someone else about those things, because that means someone will know about them, and as much as librarians would like to be the kind of people you can trust for those conversations, it requires a lot of rapport or witnessing a librarian prove themselves to be an ally before those subjects will come up. Mostly, though, people don't tell us everything up front because they don't realize that's what we need to be effective. Thus, The Reference Interview, which is essentially a method of asking open-ended questions to a person so that they will give us more information. In my class, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the open-ended question by first playing Twenty Questions with a standard reference query. You don't get much out of someone if the only answers you get from them are "Yes" and "No". But with the open-ended question, you can get to the result in two questions.

As with all things, of course, we get the idealized version in school and then have to learn how to translate that out to the real world. Some people, of course, are clearly intent on their thing, whether that's computer access or getting to a spot in the library, and are uninterested in any further conversation than what's necessary. Others, however, seem to respond well to a particular question I've learned to ask: "Is there something specific you are looking for?" Because a lot of people that ask you where your section on X, Y, or Zed is do have a more specific thing in mind when they ask, but they often figure they can find it themselves if they get into the general space. Assuming they have the right general space, that is. The Dewey Decimal Classification is full of oddities and prejudices that make it harder to use than classifications that might give more equal weighting to religious subjects or that might file works of poetry under their languages rather than as a separate section all to themselves. Still, asking for specifics is definitely one of the ways you can get someone to engage with you on the subject.

Getting people to tell you what they want is sometimes an exercise in free association games. "I want a good mystery." "Okay, tell me about some of the mystery authors you like reading." "Well, I like author Alice." "What do you like about Alice?" "She writes Ex, Why, and Bet." "Have you read author Bethany? She does Why and Bet." "Don't like her." "What don't you like?" And so on, until we often go to the stacks to find an author that seems to work and is checked in, which usually triggers remembering a few other authors and asking about them, until the requester has a few books to try that are new and see if they like them. Wandering the materials is often one of the things that triggers place memory for both librarian and user, and it's always good to go check the shelves to see if you're perfect recommendation is actually available - our catalog system doesn't know any better when things have been disappeared from the shelves one way or another, or when they're in the wrong place by accident or mischief.

Algorithms cam do some of this work, at least in the idea of recommending more to you based on what you already like and have read before, and some in the matter of tag and keyword matching, if the tagging and categorization system is sufficiently robust and deep to make matches and linkages. But sometimes it takes a human touch to get someone acquainted with material they wouldn't otherwise be interested in at all. Because sometimes you get a person who comes in very interested in sports stories, only wants sports stories, and then ends up leaving with a story all about zombies invading an idyllic town, because the main characters go to town on the undead using their baseball bats. Or a story all about an intergalactic cooking competition, because of the sport-like atmosphere of the event. And sometimes you get successful by hitting the almost-random button, where after listening to the things that are liked and the reasons why your suggestions keep getting rejected, you tempt the reader with something that has a promising cover blurb, good art on the cover, and the guarantee that they don't have to lay out any money for it or read past the first few pages to decide whether or not to stick with it. Sometimes it's a complete bomb, but more often than not, there's enough of a spark to follow it through to completion.

Recommendations and reference questions are as much an art form as a formula or method to follow. Establishing a shared terminology, getting to the actual question, and then finding promising leads are matters of finesse, social engineering, mapping a search engine query to the human knowledge collected, and then interpreting the results back to the person to see whether you're on the right track. It's a very individual act, and while I learned the broad sweep of how to do it in school, the more I learn my community and the people that live in it, the more I know how to make my interviews effective. Which comes with the extra bonus of being able to stay articulating needs and gathering information from people who aren't coming to the library, but should be.

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

Libraries think about space a lot. It is an unfortunate consequence of being a tax-funded institution that most libraries do not have the space they need to function properly, much less actually be able to let their collections and their workshops breathe and expand to a comfortable place. There is a constant battle between competing interests about how to best arrange the space for maximum enjoyment and occupancy. Libraries with fixed and rooted shelves have even less flexibility in their arrangements. Which is not to say that it isn't possible to rearrange, just that remodels are costly and therefore rare. Often, the remodel accompanies a major repair or system upgrade, as it is much easier to justify putting it all in new places when you're going to have to move it all anyway.

Based on my experience of working in libraries, I have advice for architects and students about designing our spaces.

1. Design for a space that is too small to accomplish its ends. You may not be able to change the square footage of the space, but understand that you are designing for a space where every cubic foot of volume is precious. If you do not have experience in successful design for tiny houses or very small apartments, study those before drafting, because you are going to have to find a way of making this tiny place seem spacious and spread out.


2. Acoustics matter. Each person in the library is going to be both generating and receiving sound, and people are much more likely to complain about receiving sound. Therefore, if your floor plan places any likely loud section (children, teen, meeting room, maker space) directly next to a quiet space (reading space, computer lab (in theory)) without an intervening partition or effective method or redirecting or canceling that loud, you are setting up the library to receive fairly constant complaint about the noise coming from over there. If you set it next to the teen area, as my location is, that's additional complaints about how teenagers are flexing their newfound linguistic power to be able to curse and utter boisterous boasts without their parents or teachers around. One of the libraries I worked for opened a building that was essentially an airplane hangar of space, but crucially, the space where the story times and the game programs and all the loud stuff happened was in one end, could be closed, and had several buffers of tall shelves to stop the noise from getting to the quiet areas further back. It was cavernous, but the acoustics were well-managed. And please, do test your acoustic solutions. It can look nice, but if it doesn't work, go back to the drawing board until it does.


3. Design a building that will still function in thirty years, assuming there will be at least five things you could not have anticipated happening in that time. As a tax-funded institution, the opportunities that a library system will have to build a new building are few and far between. Bond issues and capital funding are generally go to the voter things, and voters are...finicky, even when they like you a lot. Many of the buildings that the public library has were built by Carnegie philanthropy, and there have been emergency repairs since then, but that's it. Since then, there have been a lot of media format changes, program ideas, and computers and the Internet, all of which have to be crammed into a building that was originally designed to house books and a select few people to read them and use them for scholarship. We make do, but it would have been a lot nicer for all of us if we didn't have to fight the design of the building to make it work. Design a reconfigurable space for us and we will enjoy it.


4. Design for giants as well as smallings. This is one of the trickiest parts of getting a good design, but if you nail it, you will have done great work for all of us. It's not just the children's area, though, that has to be designed so that grownups don't destroy their backs and knees and the children can get to the materials - help desk spaces should be adjustable to child-size, preferably without forcing the librarian to have to sit on the floor to do it. And in theory, even the stuff on the top shelf should be accessible to children, either by raising them or lowering the shelf, or by only having shelves that the children can reach the top of. And that adults can reach the bottom of without hurting themselves. But also remember there isn't enough space to do it the way you want to, so you're going to have to innovate.

And then there's just, well, being tall and a children's librarian, which means understanding a lot of being big in a space designed for smaller people.

There's also the part where my current workspace was a kludge, because the building was designed for three stations on the assumption that a children's librarian would be out front most of the day, because there would be a children's desk. There isn't, so there isn't, so there needed to be a new space for me, which was put together mostly out of the spare space in the middle. It helps keep me from expanding by not giving me space to clutter, but it's definitely not one of the designed workspaces. It's much like going to locations that have enough space for their staff, and then having a visitor librarian makes it harder for everyone to have a station that needs it. But we adapt. We almost always manage to. Sometimes to things we shouldn't have to.

Library school often makes overtures at the idea that your community isn't going to have everything you want, but it didn't talk all that much about how the community around you is heavily going to influence your vision of what is possible, and that includes the building space that you have and the budget you get. There's still great things that can be done with it, but seeing where you get your job can be a thing that inspires or deflates a graduate's hopes.

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

I enjoy making old technology work in new situations, and wringing every bit of performance that I can get out of a device so that I can keep using it until it well and truly dies. Every tablet I have owned has been part of the Nook line of tablets, because while they haven't been the fastest creatures in the tablet universe, they have been the cheapest, and each one has been flashable so that I can have them running some form of custom Android experience. I love that Raspberry Pi computers cam be used as media clients, appliances that can run messaging programs, or be transformed into system emulators that have enough power to remotely play streaming games from a computer. My very best find will be something slightly less than top of the line that can be popped open and modded so that it is the top is the line with some help from new software or firmware. For the longest time, my house router was a wireless GPS network router transformed with a new firmware into broadcasting itself strongly enough to cover the entire house and all the way or into the backyard. I've always had to work with severe budget constraints in mind, and so I've always been trying to come up with ways of making what I already have into something strong enough to work.

This makes me a bit of a good fit for the public library, as we get rid of technologies and formats much much more slowly than anyone else. The library has manual typewriters, even though word processor software is now than forty years old at this point. My system ditched the last of its cassette holdings in this decade, and VHS fully perhaps at the end of the last one, despite the format not really being available for a while before that. Despite two databases that we have had access to for years, we finally made the decision to stop purchasing the paper copies of automobile repair manuals. And so forth. Much of these decisions to retain old and outdated formats is because a not-insignificant portion of our user base is still using those technologies and is quite content with them. There are still plenty of cars with cassette tape players, after all, and while vinyl is on the upswing again as a format, it never really left in the first place. Other times, it's because the work being sought hasn't been published in a new form. If the thing you're looking for existed once in paper, and it hasn't been digitized in someone's project, then you're essentially stuck in microformats if you want to see the thing itself and how it's arranged (unless you are interested and able to take a trip to an archive where the thing itself is preserved, and even then, you may not be able to see the original unless you have a convincing enough research purpose for it. Microformats are relatively old, but they're also relatively stable. Our library might still have a singular microformat reader in the system for that reason, but digital collections are slowly starting to index the back catalogue and will hopefully provide a more searchable interface for this information. (The tradeoff is that those forms are subject to new issues like power surges, DDoS attacks, the running out of their funding, and bit rot. So old forms will not disappear entirely, because we have a lot of practice at preserving them and a demonstrated need to do so.)

However, the public library's users do not consist solely of people who are trying to control the pace of change in their lives or those looking to preserve or access the past. The library has to also serve a population that is trying to make sense of their right now, the current moment, and keep up with the popular culture and be literate and knowledgeable about the world around them. Which necessitates having much more current formats, such as compact discs and digital video discs, as well as downloadable versions of books, magazines, newspaper articles, government actions and proclamations, scientific material, and performed works. Having (or getting) this material, in addition to having people trained on how to get or and bring it to the library, cam be the difference between apathy and active allyship when the library has to go before the voting population to ask for sufficient money to keep the lights on and the people employed. Since there's so much of it, there has to be decisions made about what gets bought and circulated, and for how long, but we have a lot of people who use the library as an extension ox their own personal media libraries while they try to preserve as much of their money as possible so they aren't bankrupted by life (or their own body's needs).

A critical component of the public library that has not always had the most attention paid to it, though, is to look forward into the future and see what will be relevant to the community the library serves, as well as developing a rapid-response capability to produce and curate material and programming for a community in the aftermath of an unexpected event. (Regrettably, those events are usually tragedies in the community.) Public libraries are generally conservative institutions by practice, but that conservative outlook generates a gap of people who use the library. Children use the library because it's cheaper to borrow a book than to buy every one that might be interesting and then turn out to only be read once. They use it for homework help and to get some fun in their lives. Teenagers, mostly the same thing, but also because the library is a place they can socialize after school and before they have to go home. But once you get past teenagers, the adults that come to use the library fall into the categories of people that are looking for older formats, parents starting the cycle of readers with funfair own children, and adults that are looking to use our resources because their lives don't have them, whether by circumstance or by choice. Job-seekers and those looking to use the Internet are a large part of our adult user base. Cord cutters are slowly growing as part of that base, who don't mind waiting months for things if it means shucking their $80-100 monthly cable charge. (All the Game of Thrones fans also like us a lot because that means not having to pay for the premium cable offering on top of that.) As demographics change, public libraries need to adapt.

For example, the tragic events that sparked Black Lives Matter started a fierce discussion about police accountability and procedure. In most of our communities, the library's meeting space was a hot commodity for groups to organize, discuss, and have conversations all about what was going on, but many of our libraries did not actually host or have official programs on the matter. (Many of the libraries had concerns that hosting such things would be considered partisan and against the idea that libraries are neutral. That is another matter, but I don't think libraries have ever been neutral. Nonpartisan is probably the best to aspire to.) It took my own system nearly eighteen months before they decided that perhaps that's needed to be a group that would react and provide programs and lists for when something like a massive amount of sex scandals drop. Because we can be remarkably...something about believing that such things as police shootings are one-offs.

We were a little quicker about the increased attention being given to science education in schools and the general uptick in STEM as the next great fad, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every public library went out and trained their staff on science programming and rearranged their spaces to accommodate places to make and do creative works work various levels of technology. Not every place would necessarily need a three-dimensional printer, but plenty of places did a lot of looking at what they were doing and seeing if they could rebrand it as a STEM program, because they didn't have the budget to get anything new. (Because people seem to think public libraries can survive perfectly well with a budget that would make any other civic agency curl up in the fetal position and cry, in addition to the other parts about being a generally conservative agency.) But it was still mostly a youth-led thing - and youth services and teen services are usually more forward-looking than other departments, because we have to keep up with what the kids and teens are doing, and that includes trying to make coherent sense of Tumblr culture while it resembles an electron cloud governed by the Uncertainty Principle.

Library school likes to assume that people are coming in for well-defined information needs that are either timeless or well-documented. The actual reality is that people often come to the library because there's something there that's immediately relevant to their lives there. One of the best things a public library can do is figure out how to have something relevant to as many people as possible as much as possible.

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

Most of the people who come into the library are seeking knowledge, information, or at the very least, a place to go where they can watch porn without being judged for it at home. (Because once there are kids in your household, United States Standard Moral Guardians will insist that all environments be sanitized for them, let they come across anything those Moral Guardians deem inappropriate. It is a good idea to not leave things about where someone who isn't yet capable of understanding can find them casually, but parents are also humans and do not give up the right to be humans when they become parents, even if it seems like it.) They can be anything from solicitous of assistance to entirely standoffish about your presence near them, but if something comes up, they're likely to listen to what you have to say and come away with new knowledge on how to do that thing again if it should come up. Even the ones who are terrified of the technological nightmare of modern living learn that the library is place where they can go to get help in navigating the new space. Many people appreciate the resources and knowledge that the library provides, sometimes through direct experience, and sometimes by understanding in the abstract what kind of safety net is spread underneath everyone when there is a robustly funded public library in their community.

There are also people who resent that they need any sort of assistance at all, those that believe quite falsely that the public library is sucking them dry through severe taxation (seriously, dude, we cost you one extra-fancy coffee drink per month, typically) and holding back their rugged Objectivist selves from becoming the next rich capitalist ubermensch. I'm not going to say we take delight when those people come in and need to use our job assistance services or our computing resources so they can update their resumes and set up job agents, because it's cruel enough trying to find work that days, it's also unhelpful to getting the job done. But we might push their success story to the top of the list of people to talk about how awesome the library is at helping people find jobs. (After getting permissions to use name and likeness. Otherwise, a suitably anonymized version will do.)

And then there are the people who know everything about what they're trying to do, and you can't help them, or worse, all you have to do is exactly what they tell you to do and everything will be fine. Never mind that there's a good chance what they are thinking has a wrong procedure step, is asking you to do something completely different than the way you actually do those things, or is otherwise going to fail because there's something wrong with how they want to accomplish the task. Often times, observing what someone is trying to do will make the flow in the plan stand out. But when you try to point that out, it gets dismissed as unimportant. Or the menu you are suggesting for them that contains the option they want is clearly wrong because the label on the menu doesn't explicitly say that it's that option. An exercise in patience is not the only thing that is needed for success in these situations.

Example from this week - a user calls the library with a title that will definitely have to be inter-library loaned, as it's one of the standard genealogical texts and my library system does not maintain any sort of genealogy collection (that would be the city system next door that contains the local history archive). We have a process for interlibrary loans - it's confusing to people who haven't done it enough, but we're helpful folk who we get you through it okay. The person calling had a title, which makes it easier, but was insistent that one of us needed to call over to a specific library in St. Louis that advertised they circulated their genealogical material to other libraries, so long as a librarian makes the request. Because that work is usually a reference work, and libraries don't circulate reference works. So all we have to do is call this library and have them send it over.

Except no, there's a process, we can find it in our ILL, and there's always the possibility another library will also send us their copy, and it will be both closer and cheaper for us to talk to them than it would be to talk to this specific library. Which I explained. The response was "I'll bet you a quarter that you're going to tell me you can't get it on Inter-Library Loan." Even though the library the person was talking about is visible to us in our ILL system, so it's likely that we'll get to them if there aren't any better options anyway. This person is very convinced their way is the only right way, though, and can't envision any other way.

Library school does a lot of things, but it can come up short on people interactions that aren't ideal. There's a little bit of talking about when people aren't giving you enough information, but there's not quite as much about when people are convinced they have all of it and you are just there to justify their worldview.

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

I did not go to library school to become a manager. I think I would be a terrible manager, even now. I did not want the responsibility of overseeing people, dealing with budgets, paperwork, evaluations, and the like, and I most certainly did not want a job where I would be stuck in an office all day without the opportunity to do programming and public service. Many of the jobs offered for the degreed folk out of library school are the kind where you will be stepping into a managerial role, because the library system feels the best value for your salary and degree is placing you as high up the chain as they can. My perfect interview was for just such a position, and we both realized that it was not a good fit because I didn't want to do the management part, I wanted to participate in programming. My current position started out with no supervisory requirements and no people reporting to me, even indirectly.

And then the recession hit. And as we were getting out of that, and the layoffs that had followed with that, the upper management decided that the people who had the library degree were now people who existed on the totem pole of people who are empowered to make decisions regarding policy, behavior, and asking people to leave for the day, especially for those times when there were no supervisors or managers around to handle such a matter. The librarians were also empowered to "direct the work of the branch" as needed to make sure everything moves smoothly and people are doing what will be helpful. The union went "Bzuh?" and there were some very interesting back-and-forths there about whether or not that meant the librarians and assistant supervisors were being given supervisory powers and needed a commensurate rise in pay and reclassification to acknowledge this new ability of theirs. And also training in their new supervisory powers, because many of the people with the degree in the front line had no training, experience, or desire to take on managerial work. Eventually, the management said "no, you're not managers now, you're just people who are places where the buck stops if stuff happens while the manager is out." Net effect: New responsibilities, no new pay, and no actual power to supervise, but, y'know, the ability to suggest or something and expect that people will follow along with the suggestion.

Cue the people with the new responsibilities going "where's my training?" Which never actually materialized past a single sheet of "here are some examples of where your new responsibilities will need to happen" and an afternoon where specific and pointed questions about what we could and couldn't do and what sort of powers we actually had went...nowhere, and we were told essentially that they trusted our judgement enough to be able to handle whatever situations came up, according to the policies in place. We asked for specific reassurance that we would not end up on the receiving end of disciplinary action if our interpretation or application of the policy wasn't right or wasn't exactly the way they wanted us to handle it. We got none of that past some verbal reassurances that so long as we were giving it our best effort and trying to do it right, we wouldn't get in trouble. (Unless it was a right royal screw-up, of course, or it could be conclusively shown that we were deliberately acting contrarian or in bad faith.) The training still hasn't happened, and we still don't have any specific reassurances past that point. But it's been in place long enough, with enough things having happened, that there's a vague sense of competence that comes with the territory, and the axe hasn't fallen on anyone (that we know of) yet for how they've handled things when they came up. And we're still not actually endowed with any supervisory powers or responsibilities.

As a way of making us learn the ways of the manager, it's a pretty good sneak tactic. We have days as the designated person in charge, where if things go pear-shaped and the manager's not here, it's our thing to deal with. And there's usually a debrief after a thing happens on what we could have done better or alternate ways of approaching the situation. It is not for nothing that I will refer to myself as the "Poor Sucker In Charge" when I've got that particular potato to hold. Because someone who's already gone through a "you've fucked up, here's your disciplinary probation" on the matter of a wrong application of policy (as well as the aforementioned rumor mill and manager interpreting things negatively) is not going to react well to being given responsibilities backed by promises that things won't go badly if things go badly. Because someone has already broken those promises to me once, and it nearly cost me my job when they did it.

Library students now might have a mandatory management course or two to get through, because more and more the library degree is also coming with various levels of managerial responsibility at any given organization. The recession crisis impacted budgets and staffing levels pretty heavily, and so a lot of places are working on a crew that's less than full capacity. And so more responsibilities devolve to the people who may or may not have wanted them in the first place.

And the most insidious part is that if I get to the top of my current payscale and want more money than what I will get through cost-of-living adjustments and the occasional classification study that will reveal we're underpaid compared to the richer county nearby, I'm going to have to learn how to be a manager, because the only way up from here is by becoming a supervisor. Or by finding work in a place that's not where I am right now. I can't say that I'm really all that thrilled about the prospect of any of this. And that's before we talk about things like communication disconnects, the insulated space that's away from public service (and how decisions coming from that space can be clueless), and all of the other fun difficulties that come from having an organization with several layers of management.

I still think I'd be a terrible manager. I don't have the right skill set for it, I think I don't have the temperament for it, and I doubt my record of work as an employee is going to recommend me much to the higher levels. Yet, here I am, gathering experience in doing just that, because my organization decided that everyone at my level should unofficially become managers. It would be like telling all the Adult Services librarians they're responsible for at least one story time a week and then not providing any training on how to do story times the way we want them to.

If I'm doing the work, though, they should pay me for the work that I'm doing. Starting with the training that they still haven't provided.

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

redisxwing asked about "The worst thing they taught me / the thing I never use", and I have to tailor this one extremely narrowly, because even the things that I don't use on a regular basis in the specific, the general principles behind them are used even more often. This is one of those cases - even though I don't use the specific thing all that often, the stuff that I learned so that I can do the specific thing is something that I use all the time in person-computer interactions all the time.

So, one of the required courses to graduate out of library school, at least for me, is Search. The course numbering suggests that it's a good class to take in your second year, but regardless, everyone who wants out of the school will have to pass Search. Search builds on the foundation courses about the nature of information, how it can be organized in electronic and non-electronic systems, and how people exhibit information-seeking behavior. Your favorite search engine has people with degrees like mine who are looking at the way people use the engine, what they search for, what they click on as possible answers, whether they then come back to the results page and keep clicking, what metadata the results pages have to describe themselves, and so forth. All of this information gets fed into algorithms that take into account authority, popularity, inbound links, outbound links, and whatever secret sauce the company believes will make their product the best at what it does, in addition to any additional tracking data the company has collected on you through web bugs, cookies, and other "personalizing" things.

(As an aside, I've switched to using DuckDuckGo as my engine of choice for their stated promise to not track you through personalizing materials, but also because they offer a syntax that allows you to specify which other search unit you would like to use for your query -- things like Wolfram and Wikipedia are in there, along with more standard offerings like Amazon and Google Images.)

Much of the information that's collected on user search behavior goes back into the people programming the algorithms to provide results that are more in line with user expectations, and some of that information goes back to the people in charge of the natural language interpreters so they can fine-tune their guesses and processing so that when someone inputs a question instead of a sequence of search terms, the engine can put back something that indicates it has parsed things correctly. A thing I like about Wolfram is that it explicitly shows you the assumptions that it is making on the results page so you can track whether or not it has interpreted you correctly. This is fantastic on maths or science-related queries where language can cause wrong assumptions. There are likely people there that look at any time an assumption gets corrected and use that information to adjust their models and their processing so as not to need correction (as much) in the future. These things are all done in service of making the search engine easier to use and more likely to produce relevant results, which means you come back to this particular search engine and allow yourself to be served advertising, either in the sidebar, as a "Sponsored Link", or otherwise.

And for most people, this is enough to get them through their queries. Often times, that's enough even for the information professionals to answer the questions put forth to them. Where Search class comes, in however, is when that's not enough, or when you need more than just precision, you need [Spaceballs]Ludicrous Precision![/Spaceballs] Because most, if not all, of your search engines have a syntax to them that allows you to exploit the fact that they're machines parsing query strings to the fullest. Programmers that use and are familiar with regular expressions will not be surprised by this, although most search engines don't parse a regular expression and then do that.

A representative page, one of many many, that detail some of the special operators one can use with Google, in addition to things like logic operators (AND, OR, NOT) and wildcard operators (like * and ?) that can help you really get a good search construction going. In the earlier days of search engines, the logic operators were a particularly normal part of queries, but they've dropped off some with the ability to search more naturally, and a tweak gleaned from the aggregate data - most search engines silently added the OR between your terms if the natural language processing doesn't do something else to it. If that's not what you want them to do, it can be immensely frustrating to keep typing things in, only to keep getting bad results back. That silent OR can be overriden with some explicit ANDs or NOTs, but you have to know to do it before the search engine will sit up and take notice.

Same thing with wildcard operations - there's some silent pluralizing and de-pluralizing that goes on in search engine queries, so that if you esearch for "eye", you'll get results with "eyes". If what you wanted, though, was results with a phrase that begins with "eye", but you're not sure how many characters follow after that, stick an * afterward so that it will return "eye", "eyes", "eyeshadow", "eyes on me", and so forth. And if you're looking for both "woman" and "women" at the same time, well, most engines will do that for you, but if you have to go diving in various places for research, you might have to add on the idea of "womyn", which may have TERF-y baggage attached or not, depending on the results. Most engines won't silently search all three. But since they're all only a letter apart, and the letter that's different is in the same spot, you can search "wom?n" and snag all three at once. (And also "womin" or "wom3n" if such a thing is used somewhere, because the ? operator says "there's a character here, I just don't know what it is.") The ? is great if you're searching for something that you're not entirely sure how it's spelled, or if it has regional or historical spellings - was that conflagration a "fire" or a "fyre"? If you're looking for documents in a time where spelling is very much funetik, you're going to need all the wildcards you can get.

Most engines implement a version of special operators, logic operators, and wildcards, and the good ones will document the things they will accept and won't accept. Librarians in the time when online access to journal articles was just getting started will have a special...feeling...for one of the early subscription databases and its interface. DIALOG is very good at retrieving things, However, it also charges by the unit, rather than as an unlimited access subscription. Units accumulated while being connected to the service, for running searches against it, and for any retrieval and printing of information from the service. Kind of like how AOL used to charge by the minute/hour for World Wide Web access. Therefore, the budget-conscious librarian would spend a significant amount of time building their search string before even getting near the service, and then connect, run the searches in a flurry, retrieve their best results, download/print them, and then disconnect. Efficiency of search meant saving money to use for further searches in the future.

In case you were wondering, DIALOG offers operations on boolean logic, wildcards and truncation, proximity of words to each other, and the ability to search by just about any field that's been indexed, whether by word or by phrase. In addition to the ability to combine result sets and apply new terms to the combined sets. Search strings for DIALOG can, and have, resembled some of the more complex regular expression strings that you might see nowadays.

My instructor for Search wanted to be sure that all the students had a really good grasp of how searching worked, how engines were organized, and all of the things that modern search engines pull on people silently, often in the name of ease of use and accessibility to their content. Which means I learned how to search on DIALOG. Thankfully, there was a training and education subset of the service available for us to use that would still count our usage, but it wouldn't actually charge us for the use. Terminal access was the best way to get in and be sure you got what you wanted from there, so you can also imagine having to hope that your search query string could be held in the buffer of your favorite shell client, too. It seems like a throwback to an earlier era, but my instructor made the point perfectly - by forcing us to account for every character of the string, we made sure we got exactly what we wanted out of it. And we didn't have to fight the "helpful" features of the engine to get there, because there were no helpful features that we didn't have to explicitly invoke for ourselves.

I would never recommend throwing DIALOG at a first-time searcher without explaining the terminology, letting them research how the things they're going to be searching are indexed, and letting them construct a few practice strings to sand out the rough spots. It's an incredibly valuable training tool, though, for deeper understanding of how machines interpret search, what they're doing in the shadows, and how to test them out and see if they can understand the kind of precision language and syntax that you might need when you have to filter a wrong idea out completely from your query. I don't specifically use the knowledge of how to make DIALOG do my bidding in my day-to-day job, or, for that matter, outside of the specific class where I learned how, but the things that it taught me? I use those all the time in winnowing and getting other, less persnickety search engines, including our catalog, to cough up what I want with a minimum of fuss or bad things.

I can make your search engine dance to my tune, given enough documentation or enough tries that I can figure out the way it works. Most of the time, I don't have to. Most.