The Liminal Librarian

Catching up further, I saw this on in AL Direct — this guy stretches his library’s tiny collection development budget with sites like Paperbackswap and BookMooch. Smart!

On the same day, Clark had packaged seven books to ship out — paying all the postage personally — though he said both the incoming and outgoing stacks were smaller than average. Web sites make it possible. Clark has 800 books listed on www.bookmooch.com, 1,500 on www.swaptree.com and 2,500 on www.paperbackswap.com. He keeps a wish list of items he’s looking for, as do librarians and individuals all over the world. Computers do the matching.

In an era when any publicly funded institution has to spend wisely, Clark manages to make a lot out of a little. His annual buying budget of $4,400 comes from donations, grants, and proceeds from the library’s endowment. His salary and other operating expenses are covered by contributions from the towns of Hartland, St. Albans and Palmyra.

While he said the library has enjoyed steady public funding in recent years, it still operates on a bare-bones budget. Clark is the only employee, paid for 34 hours a week. There are situations like that all over Maine, said Stephanie Zurinski, the Maine State Library’s central Maine liaison.

Why the heck not? Especially for a smaller library that needs to maintain a tight and very current collection — what a great way to make use of weeded items and donations. And check this out:

Since Clark took over at Hartland Public Library four years ago, the collection has grown from 16,000 to 24,000 items and the formerly meager DVD, audio book and music collections now fill numerous shelves, according to Clark. Circulation has tripled to about 75 books a day and the patron list has grown from 700 to about 1,250

I’m darn impressed that he pays for the postage himself out of that 34-hour-a-week salary, too. I don’t know what he’d call it, but I’d call this Library 2.0 in action.

I’ve been reading Ann Crittenden’s If You’ve Raised Kids, You can Manage Anything. (Her The Price of Motherhood is also pretty interesting, in the Feminine Mistake vein.) When I do accidental library management workshops, I always mention raising children as one way people gain management experience without necessarily realizing it, so I’m finding this pretty entertaining.

To wit: this bit about managing change:

Marshall was teaching her baby to eat solid food when it first hit her that her two jobs — as a bureaucrat and as a mother — had a lot in common. In both instances, when trying to introduce something new, it was better to start with something bland — not too hot, not too cold. And definitely not with anything spicy the might irritate the system.

With both babies and bureaucracies, the unfamiliar must be tried slowly, or mixed with something already known and liked. With both there is also a tendency for certain flavors to be popular for a brief period to the exclusion of all else. With a small child, this might be macaroni and cheese; with an economic development bureaucracy it could be a fad such as microlending. This is not good — a balanced diet and balanced programs are better.

Babies and bureaucracies can also balk at something that is good for them, be it vegetables or diversity. If you try to slip this unpopular item in on them, they may notice immediately, and spit it out with gusto. Screams and tantrums are not unheard of. Whether nurturing an infant or a bureaucracy, you first have to spoon the food in and, when they spit most of it out, you have to scoop it up and push it back in. As a rule, the faster the food goes in, the more will eventually reach its ultimate destination. A pause will give a baby or a bureaucrat time to think and play and spit even more out.

If you’re already familiar with management books, pick up a parenting book or two and prepare to be amused at the way the material’s repackaged. Crittenden describes attending a 3-day management seminar where the well-known presenter confided over lunch that a good chunk of his material came from the field of child psychology, although he knew better than to mention this in front of a group of high-powered executives.

When we talk about implementing change and moving toward Library 2.0, it might be interesting to use a bit of child psychology to help make the transition more palatable.

Library Journal has a short news story up about “Burger to Appoint LIS Task Force” — yes, we’re back to discussing the state of library education, with the interesting note that, at the ALISE Forum on Professional Education at Midwinter: “With some 80 percent of those present educators and 20 percent practitioners, there were too few students or new librarians to offer their immediate perspective—a limitation that has also been the case in previous forums.” Meanwhile, Michael Stephens points to a blog from San Jose State University, slis21 (SLIS Associate Director: Discussions on a Curriculum for a 21st Century Library School). A post on “skills for the 21st century librarian” is garnering some particularly interesting comments, both in- and outside the SJSU community.

Our ongoing discussions about the state of library education and accreditation are a further testament to the “fuzziness” of our field. While many agree that changes need to be made, there are real fundamental disagreements on the types and scope of changes that are necessary. Those envisioned by Michael Gorman, for instance, may not resemble those desired by Meredith Farkas.

The LJ squib points out that the discussions on accreditation beg the question of “whether the profession retains sufficient commonality” around which to build a core curriculum. This is a larger question worth pulling out for examination. My gut feeling is yes, but I think we need to build that core with an understanding of the very different environments in which people will work post-graduation, and an agreement of what we need to know to both build the foundations of that work and understand the importance (and basic idea of) our colleagues’ work — of librarianship in all its variations.

I’m also interested in hearing what the rest of you feel is core to a 21st century library education. Can we update our curricula to build a common — and relevant — center?

Meredith Farkas posted a link to the Library 2.0 Meme Map on Web4Lib that got me thinking about the subject again. Specifically, that I’ve seen a lot of objections to the “fuzziness” of Library 2.0 as a term, but we seem perfectly willing to accept similar fuzziness in other aspects of our profession.

Take the word “librarian” itself. We hold onto that self-definition, regardless of whether our work includes telling stories, overseeing large-scale digitization projects, answering reference questions, or managing repository projects. My most recent career as a reference librarian at a public library, for instance, doesn’t necessarily help me wrap my head around the day-to-day work of colleagues engaged in projects we didn’t even have names for when I went to library school.

So, if we’re willing to expand our professional horizons and definitions to encompass people doing such different, yet somehow related, work, why can’t we similarly accept the varied foci of people exploring the different, yet somehow related aspects of Library 2.0? Is it simply because it’s new?

And yes, some will define “librarian” as simply someone who holds an MLS, but I think this is an oversimplification, given both the diversity of fields in which we work and the number of people who do the work and call themselves/have the title of librarian, without having earned the degree. Not to mention the fact that we lack standardization in library education and schools, so we come out with the same degree, having learned very different things.