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This weekend, the California Library Association’s Student Interest Group sponsored a collaborative, informal workshop on professional development. The event was headed up by Young Lee and I served as one of the panelists along with Cynthia, Mary, and Allison. We spent a good amount of time talking about networking and getting the most out of professional organizations so I thought I would share some of what we discussed. Here is a brief slideshow (with storm troopers).* Main points and bullets below.

1. Join digital communities. Great way to keep up with the latest discourse and trends. Also a way to introduce yourself to others in field and begin building relationship that can flourish IRL. Specific communities mentioned included: ALA ThinkTank, active listservs, and #libchat on Twitter.

2. Give away your time for free. We didn’t get into this profession for the money. Your best work will often be “off the clock” (cf. the invisible college). Develop your reputation as a willing leader and dependable colleague.

3. Build something. Eventually, you want to be know for what you can ship. Thankfully, we live in a startup-friendly culture that encourages fast prototyping and beta stages. Be willing to fail, but also be willing to put as much out there as you can until something sticks. You are what you make.

4. Build you own community. Determine what your own interests are and build communities around them (cloning yourself helps). Leverage the low cost of digital technologies to bring interested parties together to work on #3 above.

5. Limit yourself. It easy to spread yourself thin in our profession. Limit the number of professional organizations you work with so that you have the time and attention to dive into the nitty-gritty of each. Also, consider alternating the perspective from which you interact with the organization: top-down vs. bottom-up, e.g. get involved with the leadership of one organization and the ground work of another.

 

*Ok, so actually this was a presentation I prepared but didn’t have the chance to present. But these slides were too much fun to just cast aside so I hope you enjoy them.

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The announcement came today. Here’s a review I wrote of her book, Native Guard, a few years back:

Natasha Trethewey’s recent collection brings poetry back into the home. Or at least, it brought it back into mine. The elegant simplicity of her style often draped over complex forms is soft and inviting even when the subject matter is cold, stricken, and calloused.

The presence of her mother invades every page. Indeed, for Trethewey, poetry becomes the monument for her mother: the physical marker on the landscape of history. It is a marker that history would just as soon forget, much like the Louisiana Native Guard, the first officially sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army and the focus of the second section. Trethewey’s poetry creates a space for remembrance.

But she does not travel into this space without hesitation. The opening poem, “Theories of Space and Time,” illustrates her acknowledgment of what this trip might cost: “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home.” The photograph someone snaps along the way and presents upon your return shows a different you. Nothing is quite the same again. But the will to remember, to create a history that remembers, (thankfully for us) overcomes the poet.

One of my favorite poems, “What the Body Can Say,” deals with the inability to reconcile sign and signified without a mediating context. In this case, the context is the body that figures forth “something” unnameable. As with the scarred back of the slave in “Native Guard,” the body becomes the organ of speech, saying what the mouth or pen does not. This thought is wonderfully reinforced by the image of a notebook crosshatched in two different hands: one the hand of a white southerner, the other the hand of a black Native Guard soldier (this begs the questions: does Trethewey consider the work of the poet painful or traumatic?).

The need for a human contextualizing agent comes up again and again throughout the first section: the poet offers herself as context in “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971”; “What is Evidence” again depicts the scarred body, contrasting it with the (less meaningful) historical document; “Letter” emphasizes the fragility of signs, especially ones outside the body (e.g. in the form of a letter to a friend); and “After Your Death” depicts the emotional magnitude of bodiless signs in the context of grief.

Section 2 of Native Guard deals primarily with untold history. Stories that both the orthodox accounts and the landscape itself has forgotten. Section 3 is more personal and explores the role of the poet, our poet, in matters of race, the South, and the African-American’s position among the two. Poems like “Incident” weave form with meaning with subtlety to overscore powerful images while poems like “Monument” go straight for the jugular: “At my mother’s grave, ants streamed in / and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising / above her untended plot.”

I’ve read Native Guard twice I would eagerly suggest it to others.

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ollowing up on yesterday’s request that instruction librarians share their teaching materials for the time-lacking and thinly-spread among us, ProfHacker has a post this morning on sharing syllabi via github, a social coding repository. The author of the post, Mark Sample, highlights the collaborative culture of open source and his desire to replicate that culture in scholarship:

Last month at the annual Computers and Writing Conference, I participated on a roundtable about the role of computational literacy in the field—and in the humanities more generally. One of the points I made during the wide-ranging discussion (and on the backchannel as well) is that world of software development can provide humanists with “actionable metaphors.” I had in mind the collaborative nature of open source code, as well as the necessary emphasis in programming on revision, both exemplified by the code sharing platform GitHub.

While github’s text-only requirement places a significant restriction on the type of material that can be uploaded (it is, after all, meant for code not instructional materials), the philosophy behind sites like github provides a useful model for sharing within our profession, namely:

  1. To make your materials as accessible as possible, store them in flat files.
  2. To make your materials as flexible as possible, keep them small…
  3. … and keep them modular (break them up into chunks).
  4. Focus each module on doing one thing well.

If these four points sound familiar, you may have read Mike Gancarz’s Linux and the Unix Philosophy. The unix philosophy, which serves as a foundation for github’s success, can be ported to libraries as well, especially regarding the creation and sharing of instruction materials and instructional design.

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It should be no surprise to the readers of this blog that librarians are passionate. Even the most common librarian stereotypes depict us as passion-driven people (cardigans, cats, what not). But more often than not, time, workload demands, and the office environment dampen our drive. Thankfully, there are tactics library administrators and leaders can use to mitigate these darker moments of our professional lives. Paul Alofs, author of Passion Capital, offers a number of ways to create a passionate work culture in an article for Fast Company (h/t G. Hardin). These three are my personal favorites:

2. Communicate.

“Once you have the right people, you need to sit down regularly with them and discuss what is going well and what isn’t. It’s critical to take note of your victories, but it’s just as important to analyze your losses. A fertile culture is one that recognizes when things don’t work and adjusts to rectify the problem.”

In my experience, we are too quick to sweep communication problems under the rug and, perhaps, in slower technological times it was possible to wait for issues to resolve themselves. But we have the tech and the tools to create quick and easy (and relatively inexpensive) fixes to our communication problems. The first step to solving any issue is admitting we have a problem, but we can’t do that without easy-to-access channels of communication.

7. Create the space.

“In cutting-edge research and academic buildings, architects try to promote as much interaction as possible. They design spaces where people from different disciplines will come together, whether in workspace or in common leisure space.”

I’ve talked about this before. We need fewer cubicles and more break rooms (with better coffee).

8. Take the long view.

“We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. The culture needs to look ahead, not just in months but in years and even decades.”

Jenica Rogers recently spoke about this at the CARL 2012 conference and it continues to stick in my brain. We need to think strategically in relation to where we want to go, not where we are now. There is no way we can know what the future of libraries will look like, so let’s focus on creating one we will enjoy working within.

Check out the full article.

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From Back to Work, Ep. 58, about 56 minutes in:

“The incentive that you want to give people is to do the right thing… It’s [your] job to enable people to do their best work, to protect them from people who would try to undermine that, and to make sure that they have the tools and resources they need to get it accomplished without anybody screwing with them… A [good] leader is somebody that you trust to do the right thing.”

Merlin Mann is my hero.

 

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hould academic libraries focus on building their own platforms or work to integrate into existing/future educational platforms? From “Revenge of the Underpaid Professors” in today’s Chronicle:

“Will Udemy eventually be the place where tens of millions of college students and teachers come together? I have no idea. The company is not the only one with these ambitions. Everyone in Silicon Valley is consumed with the idea of building platforms. Facebook is a platform for social interaction. eBay is a platform for auctions. Craigslist is a platform for localized financial transactions. iTunes is a platform for buying and selling music. Amazon is a platform for buying and selling all kinds of things. The platform builders rule the online world.”

If the future landscape of higher education will be a maze of online courses and personalized virtual spaces, is the library a player or provider? Priest or cathedral? Guide-on-the-side or sage-[building]-the-stage? While I don’t think these new platforms will radically change professors’ pay (though, they may indeed change the social standing of some extraordinary teachers), they do present new challenges for libraries, esp. regarding the form that our services will take in these communities.

As a side note, if someone would like to begin raising VC funds to develop a platform service for academic libraries that brings librarians and individual students/researchers together across institutional boundaries… I’m in. Who knows: we might just find a way to give all those unemployed MLIS graduates a job. =)