The Librarian - The Hilarious House of Frightenstein

Well… hello…

Look at all this dust. What are you people doing there in the dark?

Feedburner tells me there are 51 of you left. Some of you are bots in the corner, but that is ok. There has to be a warm body amongst you.

One of my favourite Canadian kids shows was The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. The dusty Librarian who unsuccessfully tried to scare the children with playful nursery rhymes was was of my favourite characters. His books were always dusty.

These posts are dusty.

It is hard to explain why I haven’t been interested in writing about professional librarian and information issues for almost two years. Much of it has to do with a difficult first-job search. A lot of it had to do with coming to this government information professional job which didn’t satisfy me.

And, to be honest, my personal life was a struggle for two of those years, with another year to try to get over it.

Working alone is difficult. I felt like I wasn’t tied to the profession. For a year I thought of doing something else. I took Editorial classes, maybe wanting to work with writing more directly. I didn’t think those classes were a waste of my time, I still do editorial work on the side and I really enjoy it.

What brought be back was attending a one-day symposium “Academic Librarianship – A Crisis or An Opportunity?” (Fillipino Librarian has slides) inspired round the brewhaha happening at the McMaster Libraries. More on that in another post.

Years bring maturity. I love what I do, even if I don’t love where I am doing it. And I guess I have dust to start clearing.

Both of the above pictures are from our recent trip to the Caribbean. That is me eating jerk chicken in Jamaica and a mango in Grand Cayman.

I post these only because I was looking at an old image of myself from when I was last in school. In many respects I don’t really like the way I look here.   I am unkempt and a bit overweight. And in many respects I am not happy in this picture.   Sure, I am sitting writing in front of a pile of books, but in public I am curt and dispassionate about what was going on around me.

The last year has been so much about forgetting my time in school. I haven’t really written anything beyond a simple blog post, and for a while I wasn’t writing in my notebook. I spent the spring and summer this year, after I finally got a job, reading random science fiction and whatever else I happened to stumble across and add to my library ILL queue.

I was so unhappy with the last year of my Master’s degree–mostly because of the fact that there were no courses in my last year because of a mass exodus of new professors hired to teach more theoretical courses. So I really ran away from the faculty. I turned in my papers and refused to think about what was before was an important part of my personality:  my scholarly side.

This summer, however, I began to feel listless. One day I took an intoxicated trip to Christie Pitts park, and something drove me to bring my final term papers from my Master’s. And they are very good, even if I don’t necessarily believe the ideas in them.

Three times in my degree teachers encouraged me to publish, complete research, or apply for a PhD. Mainly because of my original failure to attend graduate school in Philosophy (although I was accepted to one school), I really was overly critical about my own skills and attitude towards study.

Reading those papers, however, made me realize what I actually love to do. Not since my undergraduate have I actually had a chance to talk to people who read Habermas for fun. I look up Theses, for pleasure, on my own time. I have many friends but I still feel very much alone because I don’t get a chance to share this with people.

So, I’ve decided, I think, that I have to go back to school. I really have to take what I have learned over the last year about myself and apply it. I have no formal plans, and I don’t want any. I am not going to do this with ambition or a plan on where I am going to end up. I want to do it for me for the pure love of reading and writing what I enjoy. To prove this for myself I have decided to audit a class, and do the work, without concern for money being spent or the mark I will get in the end. I am just doing it for me.

So watch out, I am coming to get you with a new found strength and vigour. And just a little more fun than I had before. Because I sincerely feel like a different person.

I stayed up all night reading that report, and then writing that post.  And I think that was the time I was sure I was going to be a Librarian.  I think I was already accepted to the University of Toronto then, and from that moment I knew that librarianship was what I wanted to be passionate about. I was so interested in the process of going through the library and doing research, and how this would change in the future.

Anyone who has followed my posts since then will know that this passion was slowly killed by that Information Studies program.  The story of the disaster has yet to be written.  If you had been watching me over the last year you wouldn’t even suspect that I cared about libraries any more.  And that is because I didn’t.

The struggle of having to deal with what Bill Crowley calls the “cognitive dissonance” of librarianship versus the information professions in our education.  The agony of realizing that I actually got no professional experience while in school.  The defeat of having no true mentorship in my so-called practicum.  And then the depression of not finding my first professional gig for eight months.  All this killed my interest and desire to be a librarian.

I haven’t mentioned it, but since February I have been working as the Coordinator of Information & Knowledge Management at the Office of the Worker Adviser, within the Ontario Ministry of Labour.  So despite my love of libraries and distaste for the discourse of “information,” I am more of an information professional than a librarian.  I take the problems of the economy in stride:  due to the policies of the government I am employed as a temp (through an actual temp agency).  While I am being paid less then I should, I look and see that people all around me are without work.  Six months ago I myself was without work.

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the position.  I went to so many interviews in academic libraries, and had one particularly shocking experience that I feel like I am ready to tell.  But every time I am introduced as the “tech guy” at my office I cringe.  I insist on describing my self as the librarian. I love my computer, and I am a computer nerd, but this is more of my hobby.  I might like model trains, but I don’t necessarily want to do it for eight hours a day every day. There hasn’t been a Master’s level professional here for some years, so getting people back into the habit of seeing this position as a professional has been rewarding.  After showing people that their reference questions would be answered, with care and timeliness, I got a standing ovation at the all staff conference a few months ago.

And yet, I am still more of a book nerd, even though books may or may not be dying.  At least I want to be passionate again about what books represent: introspection, transcendence from one’s daily life, education,  empowerment, and knowledge over information.

I was ready to give up on libraries altogether.  I did so well in school, I had amazing people who were willing to attest to my passion and commitment, and I served through various professional activities.  So I didn’t have professional experience like some others, so what.  When I didn’t get a job for four months, six months, eight months I was down. And parts of this job get me down every day, to the point where I was ready to quit being an information professional.  I realized I am not an information professional.

Should I work a while then leave the profession altogether, I thought.  I even thought that I should focus my efforts on hooking children onto reading while they were young (inspired more than a bit by my partner Xuan-Yen’s work with Green Thumbs Growing Kids, who’ve won a Green Toronto Award for 2009). And I still would love to work with kids more.

While I am still unsure whether what I am doing now will count if I want to try again at academic libraries, I think I’ve come home to my path with a whole new set of ideals and priorities.  Over this year I’ve been searching for something to be passionate about again, and I feel like something is starting.  At least I am writing more.

Toronto Night Market 2009

http://www.boomerang.nl/kaarten/boomerang/google-classic/

Write now I am writing this blog in the wonderful [Textmate](http://macromates.com/) Blogging bundle. I do most of my writing in Textmate, from interview preparation to my book reviews. I don’t really have an excuse to open Word anymore, except when jobs place their postings up as .doc files. Built into the blogging bundle is the [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) syntax and some other fun time saving tricks which makes writing HTML or CSS or anything else a lot faster. I also don’t use Word anymore for academic writing or my resume, having completed switched to the markup based [LaTeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX).

Over the weekend I purchased an old CDROM drive for $6.95 CDN to intall [Xubuntu](http://xubuntu.org/). People might have heard of Ubuntu. Xubuntu is a version packaged with a light-weight windowing system. I installed it on this old computer—actual the one I bought with me to my undergraduate degree. It is a Pentium III, and according to the bios only 1.0 GHz.

I hooked it up to my television and a keyboard for only 30 mins. After doing the initial install I’ve connected to it from my laptop through the terminal program [SSH](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh). I mostly use it to download things from the Internet and watch videos on the TV (thinks I can initiate from anywhere on the Internet).

A lot of this time off from my job search has been trying to realize what I actually enjoy doing.

Today I continued to work on designing my own WordPress template from scratch, which should be ready very soon. And I just caught myself reading about [Advanced SSH Techniques](http://www.mikehan.com/ssh/advanced.html). I also have been working on designing a Content Management System for a non-profit organization.

Not that I necessarily want to be entirely technical in my work, but I think it is an important set of skills to have in my toolbox.

There is not one Canadian child in the last 30 years who hasn’t seen this I think.

I think that the profession’s adoption of the word information back hearkens to a time when academic libraries were managed gateways, and technology was a way to deliver this “stuff” called “information” as efficiently as possible. And, unfortunately, the notion that the library is in the information business is the source of the problems facing academic libraries today. Or at least the source under our direct control.

Instead of teaching, supporting learning, and fostering discovery, the old academic library focused simply on getting information into the hands of its users. Instead of creating a balance between physical space and virtual space, the old library saw technology as a license to focus on resources and not people. And instead of making connections between itself and the wider community, the library relied on the strength of its information to bring people through the doors.

Balancing our virtual and physical spaces

You might be surprised that I did not mention the Internet and digital technology itself as one of challenges. This is not because I don’t have a concern, but because I think all of us are pressing to innovate in this direction. And too often the library focuses on technology as a catch all solution to our problems. But what you get from talking to our newest students is that they don’t make the same distinctions we do. The Internet for them is not something world changing–it is their world. Apart from the ease of getting items while in their fuzzy pajamas, they don’t see the same revolutionary gulf between the physical and digital as we do. For them it is just space. Space for work, space for discovery, space for collaboration.

Studies like the wonderfully innovative ethnographic study of the University of Rochester library and our own experience will show the continued importance of library as place. In fact, students are packing every corner of our physical space, even as we cede the space once taken up by bulky encyclopedias. A supervisor of mine, giving me a tour of her newly renovated library, described how they had to hire student bouncers—like at some bar or a club—counting people in and out on one of those hand devices, because the building often reached capacity according to the fire codes. The day they opened, she told me, students were taking chairs right out of the hands of the staff unloading them. Despite the all hysteria, students are coming here. It is our job to make sure that all the spaces we create—both the physical and the virtual– are welcoming ones: enriching environments inspiring creativity and collaboration.

Balancing our teaching

And, because we’ve got them right where we want them, we have to make our environments of one academic excellence. For me, on top of all of the positive experiences I had in during my undergraduate degree, and all the insights I gained from inspirational classes, the true place of my learning was the library. The library is the place where students ultimately become active, independent, and lifelong learners. It is here where students are encouraged to be critical through the simple act of selecting one item over another item. Anyway… that’s the goal.

Our library instruction therefore has to go beyond the teaching of basic information and technology skills. We cannot just teach students how to search. We need to forge connections with departments and show each student how her discipline speaks and writes, how knowledge is created and transmitted, and what it means to be thoughtful and critical when completing research in that area. This falls under the broadest definition of information literacy. In the library we do not just teach subject knowledge, but teach students how to empower their own learning. That is, beyond technology, information literacy is learning how to learn.

Balancing the place of the library in the university

We cannot out innovate Google. We don’t have the money, and we don’t have the experts. And all of the superior resources in the world will not stand up to the growing control the corporate world is going to have over this stuff called information. So we cannot be about information. Okay, I’ll give in, we cannot just be about information.

The solution to this final challenge is really the solution to all three. It should be our job to use outreach, marketing, and advocacy to remind everyone in our community what I think they already know. Cicero called the library the soul of a house. When I call the library the heart of the university, it is not only because if its central location. The library supplies the lifeblood which sustains the university: ideas. As we make our all of our spaces ones which are student-centered, we should at the same time breaking down our walls to spread this message. We should be going to every corner of the campus, and to the places online where our students works and play, to promote the library as the place where ideas happen. As the place where the path of your life will be changed by the next book you pick up, the next digital exhibit you experience, or research discovery you make.

To be competitive in a world where it hits us from every direction, success is not just serving information then getting out of the way. We have to reach out to our community to impress upon that our business of ideas and knowledge and teaching and learning. Because the library has something that Google will never have: heart.

Nevertheless it is outlandishly difficult to continue to work these jobs where I am given no responsibility and no decision making power. I have all of this training and all of these skills ready to go , but I feel like it is impossible to teach, to engage with a community through outreach and advocacy, to create a welcoming space for students to learn without a position to support that work.

I also wish I could write more, both formally and here on the blog. But I am sick of living my life in books, and ready to examine a community and tailor my contributions towards the needs of that community. But I don’t have a community to minister to (using a metaphor from one of my favorite library books, Sacred Stacks by Nancy Kalikow Maxwell).

I’ve had a few interviews over the last few weeks. Before this latest round I completely messed up my last one because I thought it was my last change at a position before being unemployed. So I was very nervous. Now that I have somewhat steady employment I am beginning to settle in for the possibility of not having a job long term.

There are some pros and cons of this process:

Pro: Being graciously welcomed into so many libraries, meeting so many wonderful librarians and other staff, and hearing about so many exciting projects in the works.

Con: Being treated extremely unprofessionally in interviews and enduring personal attacks of my passion and my professional philosophy (seriously!).

Pro: Having all the time in the world to read all of the books I didn’t get to read during my master’s degree.

Con: Having my university library card turned off because I am not a student anymore. (This makes is very difficult to study for interviews!)

Pro: Having a completely open field to make a contribution through reading and thinking about the issues surrounding libraries.

Con: The writer’s block which comes from not having an opportunity to really experience what those issues are at the grassroots level, with the fear of straying away from evidence based practice and into irrelevant and self-indulgent navel-gazing so prevalent in all fields.

Pro: Not having to dress up every day. (I take it back, I enjoy dressing up)

Con: After almost a decade of living like a student and being recently unemployed, not having the money to even keep up a nice set of interview clothes.

After being rejected for another job after an interview that both I and the panel agreed was excellent, I feel like when I finally do get a job I will want to say “No Thanks” to those colleges and universities who rejected me for now 43 positions.

Yes, 43. 43 applications, 6 interviews, one stupidly rejected offer. From tenure-track positions at top schools to part time library tech jobs anywhere, I have applied to everything. My catch-22: libraries in urban centres say I need more experience, while those in more remote areas will not even call me for an interview.

I know I didn’t get reference experience during my library degree. That was my first stupid mistake, saying I would be faithful to my old office job by working weekends, thereby messing my schedule for hours I was offered on the reference desk.

So, since no one will give me a job I have to find some kind of way of staying engaged. I have worked on my resume and cover letter until my eyes have watered. The multiple librarians who have reviewed it have said it was excellent, including the chair of the last hiring committee I spoke with.

I want to at least be engaged with ideas and write about things so I can keep my name out there. I feel that without the support of a position and a title people will soon forget about me. And then new graduates will come out of library school and I will have to explain what I have been doing these 6 or 8 months when I compete against them.

My second catch-22: I want to write in order to stay focused on getting a position, but I feel like I cannot write without some professional experience. I am sick of living my life in books, articles, and theories. I want to see what the real issues are. I want to know exactly where my energy needs to be directed. Before I embark on writing and thinking about things I want to identify where the real issues are.

But how do I do that without a job? Catch-22……

But there is also, I believe, a job for a public philosophy to perform: the job that Plato and Aristotle and Seneca tried to perform in their own day. The job, that is, of clarifying thinking on matters of public urgency through one’s own thought and writing. And this is a job that American professors of philosophy perform far too seldom nowadays, and have not performed well since the time of John Dewey and William James…. Nonetheless, part of the blame must also rest with academic philosophy itself, which too often speaks a jargon-laden language and doesn’t learn how to write in a way that would engage a non-specialist.

The first thing that can be said is that the choice between pursuing one’s own work and writing for the general public need not be seen so exclusively and so tragically. For in fact the general public is hungry for philosophical work addressing ethical and political issues — so long as this work is written by someone who sounds like a person. There is little excuse for the horrible quality of writing in philosophical journals. It is lazy and often, even in its air of precision, imprecise. It is perfectly possible to write something intelligible, and even moving, that a college-educated member of the general public can read with interest.

I wasn’t willing, or wasn’t able from the perspective of graduate schools I guess, to do philosophy in this way. And I wasn’t able to ignore works from history, politics, sociology etc which bring important answers to philosophical discussions. Becoming a librarian was not a step backwards from academics. For me it was a step into a world without distinctions between Humanities and Social Sciences, or between disciplines.

They say that one must first become a specialist before becoming a generalist, which is why all the most distinguished thinkers become distinguished in their own area before branching out. But I was not ready for that kind of obsession for 5 or more years to the detriment of all my other reading interests.

A confession: I have had the worst summer in recent memory. It goes back to having a very poor final semester. I hope to write more specifically about my school experience later. I will say that that last semester killed almost all of the excitement I had entering school. Even at the end of the winter semester I felt like I had so much passion and dedication, and my experience basically killed it.

Except for the possibility of employment. I made it through that final semester with the hope that my first position would make it better. I gambled all of my hopes on the fact that if I could only suffer through useless assignments, “lectures” dominated by group presentations, a disappointing practicum, and an administration which could be distant from the reality of students, I would be able to secure a fulfilling position which would allow me to keep learning, to keep doing research and investigation, and really help people with their work and research.

I didn’t expect to have a position right out of school. First thing, my school had no successful work study or co-op, but only a practicum which was about 100 hours of work, so I didn’t expect to be set up with a position. And, I want to be an academic librarian, which means there is less flexibility in hiring.

Now, six months after finishing my last essay, I am having a really difficult time staying motivated, keeping my passion. I remember how I used to just pull books off the shelve–on librarianship, on the history of libraries, on the future of information. All summer I have not really been able to read substantially on a topic.

Admittedly, I had a single job offer. However, I did not have a positive feeling from my communications with the people there, and it was far away, and it would have thrown my household and family into shambles. Nevertheless, I have submitted more than 30 applications and have had only four interviews.

My…depression I guess you could call it, although it is more like a slump… my slump has only deepened as time goes on because I don’t really understand what more I can do. I was in the top 20 percent of my graduating class. I have had my resume reviewed with excellent feedback. I have followed up with selection panels who only have good things to say about my interviews.

And now I have lost my student job at the library, so I am unemployed. So, that has been the general downturn of my entire summer. I have not been writing, or reading, or connecting with other librarians. I expected to be well on my way to preparing a paper for publication, participating with colleagues on projects, and working on some kind of presentation to a conference or professional meeting. How can I do all that when I am now worrying about paying my rent?

I will say one positive thing: I have been invited to participate as a junior professional and a blogger in the Canadian Library Association’s National Summit on Library Human Resources (blog, press release). The meeting over two days next week between senior professionals from every area in librarians as well as executive members of the CLA will address the future of human resources in Canadian libraries. I was nominated for a fully funded trip to Ottawa, which is a great privilege and I am very excited. Please, if you are interested, read the proceedings from me and the other bloggers involved.

Lastly, I have thought seriously about closing this blog. I’ve noticed that the library blog sphere has died lately. Or, at least, I have not read anything in my reader which I feel like I need to comment on. Maybe it is me. Or maybe not. Maybe there is really nothing much said anymore.

However, I think I will keep writing. If only for myself, to get back into having my own thoughts. It has taken me all summer to detox from the horrible experience which was the last semester of school.

I noted that in the last two days I have learned two things which could later help me offer service doing research. The context of the first instance is this book review I have to write for Library Journal on the life of [Gerard Manley Hopkins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins “Wikipedia Entry: Gerard Manley Hopkins”). Now, not being an English major, Hopkins is enough of an outside character in literature that I haven’t heard of him. So I was required to get some books out of the library and read about his life and work so I can evaluating the biography. And another piece of knowledge learned, much of his life story can be explained by the influence of the [Oxford Movement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Movement “Wikipedia Entry: Oxford Movement”), also called the Tractarian Movement. This I had not heard of either. So now I have the beginnings of knowledge and a vocabulary for this area, and can being to speak with readers on this topic.

The second case was the theory that women’s liberation, education, and empowerment contributes to the health of her and her children, and ultimately their IQ, contributing to the [Flynn Effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect “Wikipedia Entry: Flynn effect”) or climbing IQs. This I learned from reading a [review](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21721 “The Strange History of Birth Control – The New York Review of Books”) of two books on birth control in the New York Review of Books. I had known about the Flynn Effect, but now I know it has a name.

In an interview last week, I had a little bit of an intimate moment, where I told an anecdote about how when I was young I used to read the encyclopedia almost exclusively. To go into more depth here, I remember that I would read volumes and articles out of order, without any systematic approach. But over the years in my parents house I must have read all of the articles which were interesting to me. I can remember enjoying history, politics and war, anthropology and archaeology, linguistics and particularly historical language development. I don’t know if I read about philosophy as it is practiced by the academicians, but I do remember reading about Justice, Freedom, Democracy and other articles of that kind.

Preparing for the interview, thinking about my passion, that memory strongly affected me. I kind of felt at peace with where I was going and what I was spending my intellectual effort on. The more of the most important works in each area I can read, the better I will be able to serve. What kind of special gift is that, on top of everything else?

In retrospect I felt like I said a lot, and was able to put forward my philosophy of service and professional practice. They asked me about 10 or 12 questions–after that I was so worried, because we had scheduled 45 mins and it had only been about 25 or 30. But, I had a lot of questions and we talked a bit about them, so I actually think we went about 5 minutes over time.

I have this particular philosophy of teaching, and of reference service, and although I know I have certain beliefs, it is exciting to actually express them in words. One of the best questions in the interview was “Name a book which has changed your outlook in the last year” or something. I named Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is such a wonderful book, and it has change my outlook and my general interactions with students.

I am really looking forward to just getting out there and helping people, being active, working on projects. Let’s just hope this comes through in the next week and I can talk about how excited I am about this position.

How do you know it is the end of the semester? Inbox is empty….