Will Unwound

A while back we had a most interesting discussion about the process one goes through in becoming a librarian.  I use the term, “librarian,” in its most flexible form.  I believe that there are three routes to becoming a librarian:

• Go to work at a library and through the experience of performing a diversity of jobs and tasks gain the knowledge and skills needed to function effectively at a “librarian” level position.
• Go to work at a library, get “on the ground” library experience, and then pursue an MLS.
• Get your MLS and then go to work in a library.

 I went the third route.  I personally liked that route because I could approach all my library science classes from a strictly patron’s point of view.  I had no actual library work frame of reference to limit my thinking.

Each of the three approaches has its advantages and disadvantages.  That, however, is not today’s topic because today I would like to discuss how library schools can do a better job of preparing students to work in libraries but also to help libraries grow and expand.

I’ll go first.  Clearly my bent is management.  I spent all but 3 years of my 37 year professional career in management.  A big reason why I went  back to school in mid career to get a Masters in Public Administration was because the management course offerings in my graduate library school were very limited.

As you can surmise from this week’s discussion about management, I had to fly by the seat of my pants early on in my management career.  This often resulted in crash landings.  In those early years I often regretted not having more preparation in personnel administration, public finance, and local politics.  Until I went after my MPA, I pretty much had to learn all that stuff on my own.

There is no doubt in my mind that one of the reasons many libraries are at risk has nothing to do with changing technology.  If anything changing technology is bringing more people to the library than is turning them away.  The real problem is that we have a critical shortage of librarians who want to get into the rough and tumble world of local politics and lead us to the promised land of better political support and funding.

Yes, it is a challenging arena but library schools could do a much better job of a) motivating students to go in this direction, and b) preparing them to excel as managers and leaders.

Of course I could have always used a course in fixing photocopy paper jams too!

Your turn, Unwinders.  What would you do to change graduate library education to ensure the future of our profession?  Even if you don’t have an MLS you should weigh in on this question because many of you who have your Masters from the School of Hard Knocks have seen it all.

By now you all know the story of Jon, the sleepy janitor.  If you need to refresh your memory click on Jon the sleepy janitor.  Your comments after that post were excellent.  Now let me tell you how I handled the situation:

What I Did Wrong

• I escalated the situation into a crisis that did not need to exist in the first place.  As many of you pointed out, I should never have started the progressive discipline process with the very first incident.  I should have shifted instead into a counseling, coaching, and mentoring mode. 
• I also let my personal feelings get in the way.  As you will recall, Jon was both hearing and speech impaired.  In those days his handicap was insensitively referred to as “deaf and dumb.”  In many ways, these were the dark ages when it came to dealing with the disability community.  ADA legislation (Americans with Disability Act) was still over fifteen years away and handicapped people were treated as either second class citizens or burdens to society.  I thought I was doing Jon a big favor by hiring him, and when I found him sleeping on the job I felt like he betrayed me after I took a risk by hiring him.  I felt hurt.  (Look, Unwinders, you have to appreciate the fact that I am baring my soul here.  But as a rookie library director I had no experience or instruction in how to deal with members of the accessibility community.  I am not proud of my ignorance, but as I say this was an entirely different time.  We have made a great deal of progress in this country and it has not all been technological.).
• As a rookie director I did not have the appreciation I should have had for a crackerjack janitor/handyman.  I simply did not value Jon as much as I should have.  Good janitors are scarce.  Great janitors are even scarcer.  Jon was a great janitor. I learned all this over time.  It takes a while to get rid of some of the MLS hubris when you’re young.

WHAT I DID RIGHT

• After the Jon’s third strike I sought the counsel of my Board President, a Bank President, who had been a good sounding board for me in other, earlier “rookie” pickles that I had gotten into.  He explained to me that I would become public enemy number one if I fired Jon, not just with the library board and the library staff but with the whole community.  He told me that if I fired Jon, I might as well dust off my own resume.  Some of you suggested the same in your posts.
• I realized that I could not ignore the 3^rd strike rule because the staff was watching but I also realized that somehow I had to work out a way for Jon to stay.  Many of you pointed this out in your comments.
• I reflected on the situation.  As many of you noted, there was a need to analyze the problem.  Two things were wrong: Jon was sleeping and reading.  However, his work was not just getting done but it was being done very proficiently.   Clearly Jon had downtime that he took advantage of in two timeworn ways in library culture: reading and sleeping.  Because he was hearing impaired he had no warning when I was arriving early.  Not fair at all.
• I decided therefore that I needed to give Jon more flexibility for coming and going.  No reason why he shouldn’t just go home when the work was done.  As almost all of you pointed out: THE IMPORANT THING WAS THAT THE WORK WAS GETTING DONE AND DONE VERY WELL.

MY SOLUTION

• A number of you suggested that I take Jon off the hourly payroll and put him on salary.  That was the same conclusion I came to.  Leslie nailed it perfectly.  She suggested putting him on an employment contract.  This is precisely what I did.  In a sense I outsourced janitorial and maintenance function…to Jon Inc.  A lawyer on the board drew up a contract that paid Jon the same salary and benefits he was getting before and simply required from him that he keep the library clean and in good working order.  He was free to set his own hours provided that he agree to be on call 24/7 for emergencies. This helped with his sleep deprivation issues, which resulted in greater productivity.  Everything worked out perfectly, and I didn’t have to dust off my resume.

Congratulations, Unwinders.  You did a great job of sizing up the situation and offering excellent solutions. 

In analyzing the story of Jon the sleepy Janitor from yesterday’s post, you all came up with some great comments.  Each one of you provided an important piece to the puzzle of how to solve the mystery of what to do with a competent and sober but sleepy janitor.  As I look around the tavern tonight I see a lot of great management material. By the way, I am going to give you one more day to noodle through the sleepy janitor challenge before I reveal to you what I did and what I should have done 37 years ago as a young library director.

One of the comments ( I think it was from Steven) really hit home with me.  He brought up the issue of how close a director/manager/supervisor should get to the personal lives of one’s employees.  There are basically two schools of thought: 1) Detachment (stepping back from the employees and maintaining a strictly businesslike relationship) and 2) Involvement (getting to know the employees on a personal level and going out to lunch and happy hour with them from time to time).

The advantages of Detachment are:

• You maintain a professional objectivity and do not let personal issues enter into employment decisions (promoting, firing, evaluating, disciplining, giving pay raises/cuts, laying off, and transferring, etc.)
• You avoid the criticism of favoritism because if you treat all employees in a businesslike manner and never socialize with any employees, you can’t be accused of being closer to one employee over another.
• By strictly being “an all work” supervisor you avoid possibly embarrassing dilemmas that can occur at happy hour or after hour social events.  Specifically, if you say something outside of work you run the risk of being misquoted or having your remarks taken out of context.  You also avoid being asked about potentially confidential issues.

The big disadvantage of Detachment is:

• You will be seen as being unfriendly, impersonal, uncaring, and insensitive to personal human issues.  Employees like to be seen as unique human beings and they do not want to be reduced to cogs in an organizational machine.

The advantages of Involvement are:

• You will be seen as a supervisor who cares about the whole person, not just the work person.
• You will get to know the strengths, weaknesses, and challenges of your employees much better if you take the time to get to know them.
• You can reveal your own personal strengths and dedication far better if you let your guard down and let your employees get to know you better on a personal level. 

The disadvantages of Involvement are:

• You can get unwittingly sucked into the private lives of employees who have troublesome personal issues.
• You run the risk of becoming a psychologist in addition to a boss.
• When you cross the line of detachment, certain employees will naturally hit it off better with you, and this will result in charges of favoritism especially when promotions and pay raises become an issue.

What say you, Unwinders?  Yesterday you showed a real ability to analyze a personnel issue from many different perspectives.  Today the challenge is a little more general.  What kind of a boss are you, and what kind of a boss do you like to work for?

This is a situation that I had to confront as a very young library director 37 years ago.  I will give you the facts.  You tell me how you would handle it.  When all the comments are in, I will reveal my resolution.

• Jon was an excellent janitor/handyman at my little Carnegie Library.
• Jon did not have any absenteeism issues.
• Jon did not drink alcoholic beverages and had no addiction issues of any kind.
• Jon was adored by everyone on staff.
• Jon did not just keep things clean; he fixed things and they stayed fixed.
• Jon was 100% hearing impaired.
• Jon loved to read.
• Jon did not just read; he read the classics. 
• For a number of reasons Jon never had a chance to go to college.
• Jon was 42 years old.
• Jon had 7 children and worked two jobs.
• Jon’s hours at the library were from 4AM to Noon.  Then he went to his second job as an “around the town” handyman.
• Jon often seemed to be sleep deprived.
• One day I came to the library very early and Jon was sleeping.
• A week later I came to the library very early and Jon was sitting in the stacks reading Anna Karenina.
• A week after that early in the morning I found Jon sleeping in the boiler room face down in a paperback copy of Hamlet.

How would you handle this issue with Jon?  One fact you need to know is that this library was always spotless and in good repair.  One other fact you should know is that the personal policy at the time had a “3 strikes and you’re fired” rule that went like this: strike 1 – oral reprimand; strike 2 – written reprimand; strike 3 – termination.  I had issued Jon his first 2 strikes after the first two sleeping and reading incidences.

NOTE: AT THE TIME I THOUGHT THIS SITUATION NEEDED FLEXIBLE CREATIVITY.  WHAT WOULD YOU DO?  IN YOUR COMMENT WALK US THROUGH YOUR THOUGHT PROCESS.  THIS IS NOT AN EASY ONE TO NOODLE THROUGH.   WHEN ALL COMMENTS ARE IN I WILL GIVE YOU MY SOLUTION THEN AND NOW (37 YEARS WISER).

Does the library have a place in the future? 

Aren’t we all tired of dealing with that question?  I think we would all agree as long as people want to read and research libraries in some form will exist.

The more compelling question is:  Will the library continue to be a place?

That is the question that many technological commentators are asking.  The conventional wisdom is that eventually reading resources and informational data will be streamed directly to your mobile device from several large data centers located strategically around the country. 

If that happens, the term “going to the library” will basically mean pecking away on a keyboard.  The library will no longer be a building; it will be a device.  I wonder what that will mean for us culturally.

One of the best discussions we have had on this blog was from last Wednesday when we narrated the story of how we became librarians.  I was struck by the number of people who talked about their sense of awe for their childhood public library.  Sometimes the awe came from the physical presence of row upon row of books.  At other times the awe came from the building itself.  This was often the case for people who grew up in Carnegie Libraries.

When I broke into the profession in the early 70s, it was all the rage to speak condescendingly about the architecture of the old Carnegies.  The young movers and shakers of the day rejected the Carnegie architectural model as being too pompous, too pretentious, too institutional, too intimidating, too ornate, and too structured.  Modernism was at its height in library architecture at that time and that meant clean lines and open spaces.  The idea was to break down the walls of the past and create a new sense of openness.  Intimidating was out; accessibility was in.  Monumental was out; populist was in.

I bought in to the whole modernist “out with the old; in with the new” school of librarianship for my first 4 years in the profession and then something I never anticipated suddenly happened.  I was appointed the director of a public library in a picturesque little town in the upper Midwest.  The library was a restored Carnegie building.

From day one I felt special in this building.  The impressive pillars, the ornate ceilings, the literary epigrams carved into granite…all of these features said this is a very important place.  For want of a better word this building had soul, a quality that was totally lacking in the two contemporary buildings where I had previously worked.  Yes, those buildings were functional but they did nothing to make me feel special.

Buildings matter.  Architecture matters. Libraries can be cathedrals of learning.  They can inspire us and connect to our spirit. They can aspire to be something that transcends the materialist and the ordinary.  They can capture our imagination.  The old Carnegie buildings which are dwindling by the year did all that.  Your testimonies prove that.

On the other hand I can’t  think of one modernist or post modern library that makes me think I am in a cathedral of learning.

This weekend begins our profession’s big bash in New Orleans. 

Although all the library media centers and librarian twitterers would have you believe that the ALA annual conference is the epicenter of American librarianship, I would disagree.

The epicenter is still at the reference desks and in the service rooms of libraries from coast to coast.  Even on the few occasions in my career when I attended ALA annual, I never felt I was in the middle of things.  In fact I felt I was more on the periphery.

Don’t get me wrong.  ALA conventions have their place.  They are a good place to network, hunt for a job, look at all the new shiny toys in the exhibit hall, listen to authors spin their stories, sit through debates on the big issues of the day, and sample the culture and cuisine of an interesting city.  It’s all good.  So good, in fact, that I am shocked when I find out how many librarians shell out big bucks from their own meager personal savings to attend these conferences.

Of course, ALA conferences have their drawbacks too.  For those of you not attending here is what you are missing:

• Hot cities in the summer.
• Cold cities in the winter.
• Airport security.
• Cancelled flights.
• 40 dollar taxi rides from the airport to the hotel.
• 10 dollar bus rides from the airport to the hotel that take 2 hours.
• Long lines at the hotel registration desk.
• Room reservation snafus.
• Hotel coffee shops that make Starbucks seem like the economy choice.
• Chipping a tooth on the breakfast buffet bacon your first morning.
• Piling into hot shuttle buses and waiting and waiting and waiting for them to go somewhere.  Your hotel is always the last one on the shuttle line.
• Wandering aimlessly at the convention center which is always the size of a very large airport and looking for someone, anyone you even vaguely know, not finding anyone, and all of a sudden feeling depressed and lonely.
• Wondering why they give out name tags since no one looks at them because everyone is focused on their smartphones.
• Attending keynote addresses where if you sit in the back you basically watch the presentation on a jumbo tv screen.
• Attending powerpoint presentation after powerpoint presentation.  ALA is truly powerpoint presentation hell.  I am convinced that all the presenters who give boring powerpoint presentations will have to spend at least ten years in purgatory watching reruns of their powerpoints.
• Watching the audience focus on their smartphones during the dreadful powerpoint presentations and noticing that some of these audience members are watching the powerpoint on their phone. Really.  How does that work?
• Heading into the exhibit hall and finding it to be as congested as the freeway was on your cab ride from the airport to the hotel.
• Standing in line for at least an hour to get a book autographed by your favorite author only to have the author leave before you get to the front of the line.
• Spending three hours picking up every free piece of swag or chotshke you can fit into your cheesy convention tote bag(which by the way screams I am a librarian mug me after dark), hauling it back to the hotel, realizing it won’t fit in your luggage, and then throwing it all away after you realize you wouldn’t have picked up any of this junk if it weren’t free.
• Going to dinner with a group of librarians at a fancy restaurant recommended by Library Journal and after being totally freaked out by the prices promising yourself that you won’t eat another meal for the next 24 hours.  Then when the bill arrives you suffer the embarrassment of your librarian companions accessing the calculator app on their smartphones and deciding who owes what and what would be a fair tip in voices loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to know how chintzy (poor?) librarians really are.
• Following this up by going to the vendor party of your choice only to find that basically all of the alcohol has been consumed and everyone but you is drunk, which is either depressing or uplifting depending on how you look at it.
• Repeating this routine for the next 3 or 4 days.
• Returning to your library where everyone hates you because even though you paid your own way to the convention, they had to take your weekend hours.

Now, Unwinders, aren’t you glad you didn’t go to the big conference in sweaty, dirty New Orleans?  It’s much nicer here in the Unwinders Tavern. 

Boris, give me an Arnold Palmer on the rocks.  I shot even par today.  Unwinders, did you hear that?  I SHOT PAR.  Drinks on the house for everyone all during the ALA conference.  Enjoy.  Now let me tell you about my eagle on the first hole.

You can call me Rory.

A few weeks ago I was doing a staff development day at a public library on the east coast.  My presentation ended in the late afternoon and I had to head toute suite for the airport to catch my flight back to the west coast.  I flagged down the first cabbie who happened by. 

His name was Al.  Al was very talkative.  Within three minutes I had the major points of his life history – “mild” schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, a history of “mild” strokes, and several stops in rehab for “self medication” issues.  Al had an undergraduate degree in psychology and, yes, you guessed it, an MLS.  However his library career flamed out over several excessive absenteeism issues (“this was before ADA otherwise I’d still be employed there,” he explained).  Al still loved libraries and that’s why he was always cruising around the main public library building with his cab.

Al was not enamored of a cabbie’s pay potential (“not nearly as good as a second rate reference librarian”) and so he got a job driving a truck for a building supplies company.  After his third accident he was let go and it was back to driving a cab.

At this point in the narrative we hopped on to the on ramp of a very busy and quickly moving freeway.  “Have you had any accidents driving a cab?” I asked with nervous intensity.  “None that I reported.  There was this fender bender late at night but the guy I rear ended was just as drunk as I was so we decided not to call the cops or the insurance companies.  My cab had minimal damage compared to his back fender.”

It was at this point, Unwinders, that he swerved quickly into the fast lane and said, “Dude, did you say you were in a hurry to catch a flight?”

“Well…it’s not that important.  You can ease up on the gas.”

To which he responded by making a maniacal chuckle and pushing harder on the gas.

I suppose I should in retrospect be appreciative because I was a full 30 minutes early for my flight.  I was however a complete nervous wreck.  Several questions went through my mind: a) what exactly do you have to do to qualify for a cabbie’s license? b) is this what happens to librarians who get canned? c) is it really true that he would still have a job if ADA had been in effect when he got canned? d) would this man be less of a risk to society working in a library or in a cab? and e) if he hadn’t told me his life story would I have been as freaked out as I was?.

This experience has been haunting me for weeks.  It’s just a coincidence that this man was a trained librarian, right?

It’s cool these days for libraries to produce a “viral video.”   Usually these videos are a takeoff on the librarian stereotype or a parody of pop culture library style.  I have even gotten e-mails from librarians who are desperate for ideas because their director has actually given them the performance objective to “produce and direct a viral video in order to put our library on the map.”

The latest viral video making the rounds on the internet is from the Vancouver Public Library.  A lot of stuff has been going viral lately from Vancouver.  Let’s see there were the hockey riots (they lost…I thought you rioted when you won) and the kissing couple caught unawares in front of the smoke and fires of the Vancouver riot.  Now there’s a mixed message if I ever saw one.

The Vancouver Public Library video is not about riots, although it is a kind of attempt at a laugh riot and it too delivers a distinctly mixed message.  I have some definite feelings about the video but I don’t want to give these away until you have spent the required 2 minutes watching it by clicking on eBook Commercial. 

Okay now that you have watched Vancouver’s viral video my first question is the same question I have for all library viral videos: are the characters in the video library people trying to be actors or are they actors trying to be library people?  My guess is that these are library people trying to be actors.  Actually I thought the dude with the beard was pretty good.  Sure he overacted but it was a commercial.

Second question: Were you as freaked out as I was about the messages?  Here’s what I saw as being advertised:

• Dead tree books are bad.  They are heavy, cumbersome, take up a lot of room, a pain to shelve, ruin your sex life and sleep life, and give you paper cuts. 
• eBooks are great and you should try them because they are light, take up no space, allow your partner to sleep, return themselves so you don’t have to make the trip to the library, are fine free,  are downloadable from home (one more reason to avoid going to the library), and best of all you can read trash on them without anyone knowing.

Gee, and I thought I loved dead tree books.  Now I must go out and get an e-reader and then I’ll never have to go to the library again.

Am I overreacting?  I really thought this was a very weird message for a library to send out virally.  If I’m on the Vancouver City Council, I’m going to watch that video and think twice about funding the library next year.  After all, you can download and return e-books and audio books from home.  You have a whole “empire of information” and “thousands of titles” at your fingertips.  Who needs a library?

And, oh yeah, if you abolish the library you don’t have to worry about all the liability lawsuits dealing with paper cuts.

Your thoughts, Unwinders?

The comments about education, books, and reading over the past few days have been quite interesting and insightful.  New voices are mingling with veteran  Unwinder voices and the result is an extraordinary series of discussions.  Kudos to you all.  In appreciation of your great work, Boris, Maggie, and I have decided that drinks are on the house all week with one caveat. You have to tell us what your favorite drink is.

Oh, wait, there is one more caveat.  Having read and re-read all of the many comments I am struck by the interesting diversity of library people we have hanging out in the tavern.  Therefore, I thought it would be really interesting to get to know you a bit better.  Yes, the Unwinders Tavern is a place where everyone knows your name, but do we really know you…the real you?

So…to qualify for free drinks all week you have to tell us how you happened to get into  library work.  Were you inspired by another librarian?  Did you happen upon the profession randomly?  Were you a librarian wannabe from the cradle?  You all have a story and we all love stories here in the tavern.

As lead lab rat I will go first.  In 1970 I was finishing up a broad liberal arts education that I greatly enjoyed.  But I had not a clue of what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Then in my senior seminar, where we were paired with a grad school assistant for the purpose of writing our senior thesis (this was a graduation requirement and by the way my topic was “Work and Leisure in the American Utopian Tradition”).  The grad assistant assigned to me was a man named James Sweetland.  In our meet and greet, I discovered that after he got his PhD in History, he was going to go on and get his MLS so that he could work anywhere in academia (the job market then was wide open!).  I had no idea what an MLS was and when he clued me in, I knew immediately what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  Two things I loved most were books and people and this is how I envisioned librarianship back in 1970…bringing people and books together.  So right after college I went to library school, got my MLS, and then had a choice of 7 jobs.  By the way, I loved every minute of library school.

Now I am retired and I can look back with great appreciation that I was able to devote my professional life to the noble cause of building libraries and serving patrons.  It was all very random (unless you have a theistic view of the universe, which I do!).

Now it’s your turn, Unwinders.  How did you get into library work?

And, Boris,  my beverage all week will be an Arnold Palmer.  I’ve been playing a lot of golf lately and playing darned well I might add!

There is this new adage around the younger librarian set that “I love books” is old hat.  I guess that means that I am old hat because I’ll be honest  I got into librarianship because I love books and I wanted to be a part of the process of bringing books and people together.  Actually, for me it was more than “I love books.”  It was also “I believe in books as a foundation of a civilized, democratic society.”  In that regard, I saw and still see librarianship as a calling…maybe even a passion.

I believed that if you could connect people to books you could say that you were taking part in furthering the cause of civilization. To me reading a book requires thought and concentration.  The more I could get people to read, the more I could get people to think, and the more I could get people to think, the more people would make thoughtful decisions both for themselves and for society.

Today, librarians who say they got into the profession because they love books run the risk of being ridiculed for two reasons.  First, and most obviously, the world has changed.  There are so many other text delivery platforms than just books.  So the expression “I love books” can sound a tad bit Luddite and that’s not good for the 21^st century librarian.  Secondly, and more subtly, an emphasis on books can make one seem elitist.  For instance, many librarians today maintain there is no qualitative difference between reading a book and playing a videogame.  If you care to take the side that books are better for teens than videogames you definitely will be called an elitist.  There is nothing inherently superior about a book is the way many librarians think today, especially the ones who grew up with videogames.

The idea, therefore, is to provide as many different text and delivery systems to the patron as possible without making any value judgments about which ones are superior.  The line of reasoning is that digital natives are growing up in a different world and their imaginations and senses of creativity are stimulated in entirely new ways, ways in which we older folks don’t understand.

Okay, I can understand that logic.  It’s truly one of the reasons why I took early retirement.  The world of librarianship is changing rapidly and I have every confidence that a younger person is more adept at keeping in front of this change than I am. 

Here’s what scares me:  a lot of librarians can’t afford to retire because of all the salary cutbacks and the high cost of retiree health insurance.  They are literally going to die on the job.  Will libraries die with them because we are going to miss a whole cohort of younger librarians who are ready and willing to serve but can’t find jobs?

Your thoughts?