Reactions to story from Information Wants To Be Free

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  Uncontrolled Vocabulary #43 - All the librarians support us

  http://uncontrolledvocabulary.com/2008/05/21/uncontrolled-vo...
  197 days ago in Uncontrolled Vocabulary · Authority: 35

  Uncontrolled Vocabulary #43 is now available for download. Here’s a direct link to the mp3. You can subscribe to the podcast (as well as this blog) via the following feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/uncontrolledvocabulary On the call: Greg Schwartz, Louisville Free Public Library Nathan Flinchum, Roanoke Public Libraries Kathryn Greenhill, Murdoch University Rikhei Harris, Grand Valley State University Stephen Kellat, Host, LISTen, the LISNews.org podcast Tim Keneipp, La Crosse Public Library Michael Sauers, Nebraska Library Commission Links to the show topics: 1. Libraries may get saved (Commercial Appeal) 2. Followup on Is this how we encourage people to contribute? (Information Wants To Be Free) Library Speakers Anonymous 3. Cover letter meme (Llyfrgellydd) 4. Libraries Embrace Digital Audiobooks (LISWire) 5. The Oregon Question 6. OCLC and Google to exchange data, link digitized books to WorldCat (OCLC) 7. Hartford Public Library: A Study In Bad Behavior (Hartford Courant) Illicit Activities At Library? Police Chief Reacts (Hartford Courant) 8. The New IT Librarian Application (Library Garden) 9. Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects: Mass Media Representations and Public Perceptions of Librarians (Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship) Homework for next week: San Jose Library’s Filter Report Not Enough for City Councilor (AL Online) Internet Filtering: Software Tests (pdf)
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  5 Things I Want in My Next Job

  http://digitalpermanence.blogspot.com/2008/05/5-things-i-wan...
  198 days ago in The DIGITAL Archive · Authority: 12

  Being unemployed after successfully completing a contract fills me with a sequence of emotions: pride, reflection and conflict. I feel pride because I am satisfied with having achieved the objectives of the contract. Whether 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months, I feel pride with my accomplishment. Then I enter into a state of reflection when the last day of work arrives and I must, albeit reluctantly, start planning my next step. And, finally, more often than not, I feel conflict, inner conflict, that is, an uneasy, nagging sense that the hard work and excellent performance I have thus far produced and delivered are not coalescing into a structured, developing career path of satisfaction and professional growth, like many of my library school peers and former colleagues now seem to enjoy. In an effort to resolve these repetitious mixed feelings (and perhaps help others in the same situation at the same time), I put together a list of wants and needs, professionally speaking, that I want to see in any future job offer. The list items are personalized, in some ways; but feel free to tailor them to your needs, if necessary. Moreover, I want to hear what you think about these items. Am I too idealistic? Am I missing the point? Or am I hitting the nail on the head, so to speak? Here they are:1. Hired as a Professional, not as a Jack-of-all-Trades 2. Work in a University or other well-funded Institution 3. Attend Conferences, Seminars, Training Sessions 4. Work with a Team, and in a Healthy Environment 5. Work / Life Balance 1. HIRED AS A PROFESSIONAL, NOT AS A JACK-OF-ALL-TRADES I have a BA in History/Religion and a MLIS degree, plus I have close to eight years experience working in this field, focusing on web design and content development, digital preservation research, and digitization projects. As such, I want to be hired as a professional (no, I am not the department’s “web guy”). I want to be hired because of my skills and abilities, and not because the employer needs a Jack (or Jane) of all trades who will act as a warm body in boring meetings, pitch in when there is a huge backlog, fill in for the front office administrative assistant, or troubleshoot that virus-infected, spyware-saturated public access computer workstation. No, I have heard from enough colleagues to say this practice needs to stop. 2. WORK IN A UNIVERSITY OR OTHER WELL-FUNDED INSTITUTION An academic setting seems ideal for someone in the library and archives profession. The edenic campus grounds, the quiet library buildings, the youthful energy of hungry minds. But positions in academic settings are not easy to find. While I believe the academic environment would be perfect, I am still willing to accept a position at a well-funded institution. By well-funded, I mean an institution with sufficient resources to fund people and projects, and not just talk about them and sound hip. I know the usual line in the library and archives field is that there is no money, there is no funding. But ironically there is money to pay for salaries of senior level staff and to fund a project or two that will make the department look good and therefore increase visibility and perhaps boost further funding prospects next fiscal year. Listen: There is money; it is time to start using it wisely. Good professionals want to contribute, but also want good compensation (and benefits). 3. ATTEND CONFERENCES, SEMINARS, TRAINING SESSIONS I want to attend conferences, seminars, and training sessions. I want to do so because I want to come in contact with other professionals, share and discuss ideas, form connection and perhaps fuel future collaboration. I want to be part of a greater community of professionals to learn, contribute and grow as a professional. I want to attend training sessions—to learn something new—because there is nothing worse than professional stagnation. Any professional, regardless of field or years of experience, needs to be fed and supported by his or her institution. There are no excuses. [Interestingly, there is a blog post by a librarian at Princeton University Libraries that discusses the issue of attending conference and giving speeches and who should cover the costs. The Princeton librarian also cites Meredith Farkas’ recent blog posts on the same topic, here and here.] Many of us will never attain the frequent flyer miles as some of the more prominent professionals in the library field, or the opportunity to attend gaming and education conferences, or the technological ticket to attend a conference in Second Life. But as an optimist (or simply to stupid to know when to quit), I will never say never. 4. WORK WITH A TEAM, AND IN A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT Some of us like to work alone, while others like to work with a large team. I fall somewhere in between, preferring the solitude in times of project planning and welcoming a team when the time comes to execute the plan. I do not want to work any more in isolation, carrying the weight of a large-scale project. It is neither good mentally or professionally. We need each other to support our strengths and overcome our weakness. We need each other to get the job done correctly. I also want a healthy work environment. Sadly, far too many archives offices are located below ground, in basements, in windowless rooms with poor ventilation systems. No more. Been there, done that. I need windows, sunlight. 5. WORK / LIFE BALANCE I work hard, I put in the time required to complete the task. I know work is something we all do that consumes a large of amount time on a weekly basis. But at the same time that does not mean I wish to have my life outside the job to suffer or be limited. There is a line between work and personal life. I need to draw that all important line early on. There it is. Interested in digitization and digital preservation? Visit arch.i.vi.us, the Social Bookmarking Blog for Research Archivists.
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  Speaking of Speaking

  http://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2008/05/speaking_of_spe...
  199 days ago in Academic Librarian · Authority: 26

  For the first time ever, I have submitted proposals to speak at conferences. Obviously I'm not exactly itching to be famous. Over the past month, I sent in two. As I was preparing my most recent one, I read the recent posts at Information Wants to Be Free complaining about librarians having to pay their own way to speak at conferences, and the disproportionately negative effect this has on newer librarians and librarians with poor institutional funding. I feel most badly for those librarians on the tenure track who are more or less required to speak and yet also don't receive adequate funding, and who also most likely aren't particularly well paid as newish librarians at poorly funded libraries, but it's not clear that we as a profession suffer because they can't afford to speak at a particular conference or that it's a problem for anyone but them specifically. Just being a good speaker or saying well what any number of librarians could say equally well isn't necessarily a reason to feel bad that people can't afford to speak. I also would want to know why the person wants to speak. If it's required for the job, that's one thing, but there are plenty of motivations for speaking that don't particularly deserve any special sympathy. There's the professional advancement argument, for example. There's the possibility that being a popular speaker might lead to better jobs. But how necessary is this? It's not necessary for career development or getting good jobs, at least in my limited experience. I have a great job, and I've spoken and published very little. Is it the case that "famous" librarians get better jobs? I don't know, but I do know it's possible to get good jobs without being particularly well known, and I also know I can't think of any librarians on the conference speaking circuit that I'd willingly trade jobs with. Then there's speaking just to speak more, to be "famous" for its own sake. I find this the least sympathetic motivation. Many people understandably thrive on widespread recognition and speaking offers. They want to be well known and desired, and I see nothing discreditable about that, but I also don't see how it's of any benefit either to anyone else or to the profession as a whole. For one thing, it leads to a saturation of the same old librarians and a limitation on new voices. Librarian celebrity perpetuates itself, so prominent speakers get asked to speak because people have heard of them, not necessarily because they have anything particularly relevant or fresh to say in the context of a particular program or conference. This is no insult to popular speakers. Speakers tend to be popular because they're good at it. But there are other good library speakers who are never considered because they're less prominent. We're getting closer to a reason for concern here, but I see no reason to sympathize with librarians who just want to become more prominent and might not have anything to say that isn't already being said. After all, conferences seem to get speakers, and there are plenty of librarians motivated to speak because they just want to speak or because they have to for tenure and are funded adequately. And if we're honest, do we really think there are that many librarians who have such novel contributions to make that we'd benefit from hearing them speak? Would they really be saying anything that isn't already being said by other speakers and better funded librarians? We just don't know. That's one reason why this would be a problem at all. Systematic exclusion of new library voices could very well be limiting useful contributions and interesting professional discussions, and newer librarians who haven't yet been fully indoctrinated into traditional ideologies of librarianship might have a lot to offer. Without some change, we'll never know. I've argued that a problem of excluding these librarians from conference speaking and participation is that there's at least the possibility they have novel and worthwhile contributions to make to the profession and that their voices won't be heard, but we know that's not exactly accurate. These librarians aren't being silenced in any way. The biggest hole in my argument is that it's easier than ever to put your ideas before librarians. Once upon a time one either wrote for the limited library press or one spoke at conferences, but times have changed. Any librarian with something to contribute can start a blog and put forth their ideas. So if these librarians have so much to contribute, why not just start a blog? There are several reasons why not. For one, it's not like one starts writing a blog and the world sits up and takes notice. Trust me on that one! Blogs also require some sort of sustainability. There's a huge difference between having good ideas and sharing them at a few conferences and writing about those same ideas week after week. How many blogs have you seen that start up with a "Hello, World!" post about how excited the librarian is to be blogging and sharing professional ideas with the world, but then end six months later after a sporadic few posts that as often as not apologize for not blogging for a while? Then there's the difference between speaking and writing. Speaking and interacting with live human beings in a discussion of trends or ideas is very different from sitting alone with the laptop. Good writing takes effort, even if one has a sustainable blog, and a lot of librarians who might very well have good ideas and want to speak out might not write well. Also, blogs and conference presentations reach different audiences. There are a lot of librarians, perhaps the majority, who read no blogs at all, but who go to conferences and workshops. Thus, because of the difficulty of getting noticed, sustainability, writing ability, and audience, a blog will only be a useful approach to entering the professional conversation for certain types of librarians. We're still left with the question of whether excluding poorly funded library voices from conference participation excludes worthwhile and novel contributions that we otherwise would benefit from, and we still don't know. I think the fact that librarians are required to speak at conferences but aren't funded by their libraries is much more regrettable than that any specific library conference won't compensate their speakers. Partly this is because of my conception of what a conference should be. I'd much rather conferences be considered places where professionals come together to confer with each other than gather to listen to the same group of "famous" librarians time after time, but this is more difficult to achieve when many librarians don't have adequate funding in the first place. This is more a problem of insufficient institutional support for professional development, though, rather than a problem of conferences not paying for people. Paying people to speak at conferences goes against the idea that conferences are places for professionals to come together to confer with one another. So not compensating some speakers means that some librarians who may have novel or useful contributions to make to the profession are not heard, but compensating speakers goes against the conception of a conference as a place where professionals come together to confer with one another. For me at least, I think it's more important to address the issue of inadequate institutional funding than to expect to be compensated for speaking to your fellow professionals during an ordinary library conference.
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  My .02 cents on the library speaking gigs issue

  http://www.rhastings.net/archives/119
  202 days ago in A Passion For ‘Puters · Authority: 35

  I’ve been reading Meredith Farkas‘ comments on speaking gigs in libraryland and the compensation that speakers at library conferences & events receive. I thought about commenting on her blog, but I have a lot to say about more than just her post, so I’ll just throw my comments out here and let ‘em stand on their own! There has been the occasional bit of information about library speaking gigs that comes out, there is some discussion about it, then it dies down again. Rachel Singer Gordon did a survey about library conference speaking and posted her results in two blog posts. The first describes the results of the survey in numerical form, the second goes deeper into the comments left by the survey respondents. The comments are, for me, the most interesting part of the survey. As someone who speaks at conferences occasionally, I’m always interested to know what others are getting in compensation for the same kind of work (if any, really). One of the things I noticed in all of these conversations is that another regular library-world speaker who is also going to be in Jamaica in June is getting a different deal than I’m getting for the same conference. Without some openness in this topic (which is touchy because it involves money), we’ll never know how to evaluate the opportunities that come our way! I’m speaking this year at several different events and conferences for several different fee structures. Two of the conferences I’m speaking at I’m paying for travel, some part of the conference registration and all incidentals - out of my own pocket. MPOW (My Place Of Work) is economizing on conferences this year (can anyone say gas prices?) and they can’t afford to pay for all of the things *I* want to do - so I pay for some of them myself. I see it as paying my dues, honestly. Other conferences are paying all of my travel, hotel, registration and food costs - but nothing more. A few are paying all travel expenses as well as an honorarium beyond that. I’m just about going to come out even this year (if you don’t count the 8 day vacation in London - that was freakin’ expensive!!) between the conferences I’m paying to speak at and the ones that are paying me to speak, but as I said earlier - I like to travel, I love to present and I feel that I’m just starting out in this area of my career and I need to pay some dues before I can reasonably expect to make money off this. I did the same thing with my web design work - I did some free and some really deeply discounted sites before I got to the point where I was comfortable asking for real money to design a site. Because this topic is one that I’m interested in (and I’ve been known to just ask library-land speakers what they charge for particular gigs - cause I’m classy that way…) I wanted to post this here to both get my .02 cents out and to get out some links to some of the discussions that are going on now. Meredith just posted (or rather I just saw - I’m getting so behind on my RSS reading…) a followup to her post I linked to above about compensation for speakers. I’ll be following the comments on this post, too and I’ll be keeping an eye on the wiki that she’s linking to in that post as well that will, hopefully, give some transparency and clarity to the issue of speaker compensation in libraryland.

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