On the cultivation of virtue.

 
I promise that, in the end, this post will be about human resources and libraries.


***


In conservative social scientist Charles Murray's recent book, ComingApart: the State of White America, 1960-2010, he makes the familiar argument that self-governing free citizens cannot maintain a workable society in the absence of strong personal virtues. (I am only about halfway through, so I can't say if he takes the argument in any new directions.) The four virtues he lifts up as being of paramount civic importance are industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity.


Indulge me in setting aside the also-familiar counter-arguments about marriage and religiosity; the observation I want to make here is how, historically, social power in America deliberately did its best to keep whole classes of people from benefiting from all four of these virtues. The industriousness of ethnic minorities and women was attacked as “taking away” jobs from white men. Sexual minorities could not live honestly, have fruitful marriages or participate in the shared life of religious communities. These examples are the obvious ones that cannot be refuted. Of course, there are others that are more or less arguable in terms of scope and impact, along with the question of when (or if) the was of “historically” gave way to the is of the present.


The point of my observation is that citizenship does not just require virtue in order to succeed: virtue requires citizenship in order to develop. There is little incentive to work for a theoretically universal common good that deliberately or even accidentally excludes you in practice.


***


In my first marriage, I married into poverty. To say it was an eye-opener would be an understatement. I watched people that I loved making rational choices that were also bad choices. I watched their friends and acquaintances cycle through their own boom-and-bust economies on a micro scale. I learned the complete category error of the perennial question asked by people who aren't poor themselves, “Is poverty the result of moral failure or structural oppression?” In my experience, both direct and through extensive reading, what I've seen is that poverty shapes people. It's like psychological bonsai. Even with more resources, even in different environments, the history of constraint leaves its marks.


***


In human resources today, one of the more common topics of discussion is how to increase employee engagement. The basic idea is that a workforce that is both emotionally invested and competent will provide a competitive advantage over a workforce that is merely competent.


These discussions almost always make me want to laugh and cry at the same time, because highly-trained, committed professionals return again and again to a methodology of “what WE might do to make THEM feel invested in US.” It's HR as a brand-loyalty marketing program, really.


There are no shortcuts. There are no clever techniques. The way to increase employee engagement is to engage with one's employees. The way to increase emotional investment is to provide a return on that investment. People won't act like they have a stake in an organization's performance if they, in fact, don't. People who haven't had a stake before will continue to act like they don't, for quite some time.


***


In libraries today, especially academic libraries, one of the more common topics of discussion is how librarians can better respond to changing technological and economic realities. (Or, less charitably: how librarians can actually start responding, period.) One particularly desperate presenting issue is the impossible pricing models for serials, especially as they are bundled into online databases.


Recently, Jenica Rogerswalked SUNY-Potsdam away from the American Chemical Society. Responses were widely and overwhelmingly positive, though the Library Loon observed that somefolks were gravely discomfited. The BeerBrarian argued that eventhe applause contained disappointing elements, since Ms. Rogers' actions can reasonably be described as just doing her job as a library director. In larger libraries, some of those responsibilities fall on librarians further down the org chart.


A while back, I talked about whyI didn't want to be a library director anymore. The reasons boiled down to feeling powerless. I foresaw that it wouldn't be long before I had to make a similar decision to Ms. Rogers, and I assumed I would then get fired, as simple as that. I never would have predicted that faculty and university administrators could have been brought on board. Ms. Rogers is an outstanding library director, but I am thinking that the faculty and administration at SUNY Potsdam must be something special too.


I believe Library Loon when the bird says (in the post linked to above) that angry faculty get librarians fired. I think the causality there is off, though. I would say that "mediocre senior library administrators get librarians fired." Angry faculty is going to happen, especially in cases where publisher greed isn't as blindingly obvious, and it's just a question of too many pieces of the pie being a little bit too large. Communication and education can mitigate that anger. But effective communication by collection development and liaison librarians can't happen without the full support of the management layers above them. The librarians need time, personal encouragement and institutional cover to lay that groundwork.


I have had trouble over the years being tactful about librarian fears of irrelevancy and the embrace of information literacy as the primary response to a shifting information environment. Fundamentally, the prioritizing of teaching concepts over tools represented to me a surrender of any attempt to own (figuratively or even literally) thetools of library research. The profession collectively threw up its hands and said, "It's too hard!"


Well, librarianshiphas always been hard. That's what keeps it from being a pointless endeavor. If it were simple, we wouldn't need librarians as a specialized class of professional--and we clearly do. Or "information professionals," if you prefer. I'm not too picky about labels.


But librarians also have frequently needed to contend with mediocre administrators as well as a challenging environment. (The Library Loon talks about this a lot.) Librarians made rational choices about what they could achieve with the resources at hand. I realize now that I can't be too harsh on fearful librarians, though. They're correct to be scared--just of their bosses leaving them to hang out to dry, not the wider world in general.

Thoughts on staff development and succession planning

Fort Vancouver Regional Library System recently conducted a search for a Staff Development Manager. I find it hard to get an exact read on the expectations for a position from just a job description; having written my own fair share of them, I know they are a genre that frequently and necessarily combines applicant marketing with management wishlists and HR CYA boilerplate. I do think, though, that FVRL genuinely is looking to go beyond having a Trainer-in-Chief. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) One supplemental question in the application packet particularly piqued my interest as someone with a foot in both the library and HR worlds: "What is the relationship between staff development and succession planning?"

(Actually, "piqued my interest" is an understatement. I love this question. I adore this question. I will likely return to the height and breadth and depth of my affection for it in another post.)

Succession planning is an area where what smart organizations want more than anything else is options. Good staff development can help give organizations more options. For example:

• You can have people ready to move into vacant positions and promote from within.
• You can have in-house temporary coverage for essential functions of vacant positions during a search, making it more feasible to take the necessary time to find and train the right people as successors.
• You can develop a good reputation among workers in the field, helping you to attract the highest quality candidates for vacant positions.
• You can provide more challenges and satisfactions for staff who desire them, thereby increasing retention and reducing the frequency of vacant positions.

I have seen too much succession "planning" driven by urgency. That urgency can be negative, as in fear, or positive, as in opportunism. Whatever form the urgency takes, the end result is usually a narrowing of options and a feeling that circumstances are forcing a particular decision instead of informing a robust decision-making process. The organization finds itself reacting instead of acting, and the ability to see the staff as more than a jumble of job descriptions and individual skillsets can be lost. Good staff development programs, as identifiers of need as well as vehicles of improvement, can help shape that jumble into a coherent narrative of strengths and weaknesses and expectations. When succession happens--when organizations cannot avoid the question, "What happens next?"--it helps to have the narrative act more like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story than a cliffhanger.

All the responsibility, almost none of the authority.

[ed. note 12/28/12 -- I've changed the title of this post because, as things do, my feelings have changed. Not dramatically: I still don't want to be a library director at a four-year liberal arts college or comprehensive university, or at the kind of public library large enough to have multiple departments. But I have learned in my year as an "HR guy" that I will always be the person who curates the information, expands the experiences, and strengthens the relationships that bind "my" communities together. My heart pushes me in that direction, and my skill set makes it work. So, yes, I see libraries I definitely would want to be the director of, where I identify so closely with the neighborhood or the service population or the specific mission that the frustrations I outline in this post just don't matter. They just make me more determined.] 

When I was job-hunting, I mentioned in a closed forum that I had a blog post called "Why I don't want to be a library director anymore" that I was sitting on until after I wasn't under consideration for any job where, y'know, it might hurt my chances. (There were some jobs that were half-way between director and branch manager that I did try for, which I still think would have been fun and not problematic.) And now I am in HR and loving the work and feeling secure enough to say, well, any future employer who writes me off because of this post would probably not be happy with me as an employee anyway, and vice versa. So.

I still feel guilty, though. I love libraries, and I am by nature driven to be a steward for the things I love. To declare a lack of interest in taking ultimate responsibility for a library, then, feels like a kind of a betrayal. Maybe it is; I don't know. I hope not.

The nutshell explanation is that being a library director is about having all of the responsibility and almost none of the necessary authority.

In a sense, it always was this way. But it seems to me that the gap between responsibility and authority gets wider every year. Collection management is a good case in point. With print, one could decide what to acquire and where to house it and how long to keep it and what preservation efforts to make for it. With electronic resources, libraries are more often paying for access instead of ownership, the resources frequently live on unidentified servers in the cloud, availability may not be guaranteed through subscription plans, and preserving the content may be illegal even when technologically feasible. Further, if a patron could read one printed page, they could read almost all printed pages. Now, there are Kindles and iPads and laptops and smartphones and all kinds of device-related complications to making content accessible.

I am not saying that print is therefore better than digital. I am saying that, from a management perspective, print is more manageable. If a patron couldn't get what they wanted when they wanted it, the director could own the choices that led up to that situation. Now? Not nearly as much. But the responsibility to do so has not diminished.

The example of collection management points to another, ultimately more frustrating gap between responsibility and authority: revenue vs. expenses. Library directors typically have no direct power to increase revenue. Even in public libraries funded by independent tax districts, the ability to increase revenue is limited to periodic all-or-nothing ballot measures that set a particular tax levy. (And then there is fundraising and grant-writing, which are generally the least reliable exactly when the need is greatest.) It isn't like libraries can set differential price points for different services, exploit market segmentation, or anything like that. Our professional values and political (small-p or Capital-P) realities make it impossible. Again, I am not saying this situation is worse than alternatives; I am simply saying it makes libraries less manageable. It is a tool that is missing from our toolbox.

Expenses, too, are generally hard for library directors to influence. We aren't generally dealing in bulk purchases or vendor competition, at least not on a scale that allows for effective negotiation. (I haven't seen any used databases for sale recently, either.) And we are fairly constrained in the collections and services we are expected to provide. If doing X and Y costs Z and is paid for with W and Z>W, and we can't decrease Z or increase W or drop either X or Y...well, there is not much to be done.

The one thing that can be done is to decrease the quality of X and/or Y, so that they cost less.

Which leads me to the one factor I can't get around, for why I don't want to do it anymore: I am not convinced it matters significantly if library directors at almost all libraries allow collections and services to drop from "excellent" or "very good" down to "okay" or even "minimally acceptable." (It may not be true for special libraries, but from what I see of academic, public and school libraries, I am sticking with this one.) I know that it matters a lot to librarians. I know that it matters in the realm of virtue, and it will always matter very much to specific individuals with very specific needs or desires. I am not convinced, though, that it matters to most funding agencies or most users. We live in an era of "good enough," of satisficing. Maybe we always lived in that era, and it was simply easier to achieve excellence with the resources people were willing to give us in order to achieve their satisfaction. I don't know.

I do know that I am not willing to die on a hill that is unclaimed by anyone but me and my colleagues.

Would I still be a librarian? Sure. In circulation or scholarly communication, especially. I would do the best job I could with what resources I had available. But the ultimate responsibility for securing those resources, I will leave to others who are temperamentally more suited to it -- or who just haven't burnt out yet.

When the going gets tough...

With one exception, I never walked away from a fight when I was growing up. On the other hand, I never actually got into a fight, either. I didn't back down, I didn't escalate, I didn't try to make peace, I didn't bluff. I simply...stayed put. And the people who were trying to figure out if they wanted to fight decided I wasn't going to give them the kind of fight they wanted, after all.

***

I still don't have a permanent job. (I do have a temp job in the audit department of a mortgage company, which I am enjoying a lot, and for which I had to do a lot of persuasion about actually really truly wanting it.) The most interesting feedback I've gotten from interviewers was some concern about my readiness to deal with negativity and conflict in the workplace. I can see where they are coming from, because I generally talk about transparency and compassion and humility and achieving effectiveness and efficiency through mutual respect. Plus, I default to enthusiasm and cheerfulness and geekiness. So, yeah, when people first get to know me, they meet a peace-lovin', easy-goin' kinda guy.

But peace is not the absence of conflict, and when I talk about compassion and humility and respect, I'm not talking about everybody agreeing with each other or even liking each other. In fact, these behaviors are the most important when there is negativity and conflict. I speak from long, painful experience. In no particular order, here are some things I have dealt with at one or more of the libraries I've managed:

--Furious neighbors who want to stop the library from expanding.

--Staff suing the funding agency.

--Disputes over who the actual governing body is.

--Budget cuts and hiring freezes.

--Intense mistrust over health insurance changes.

--Accusations of racism.

--Persistent staff complaints about each other.

--Conspiracy theories.

--Resentment over salary freezes.

--A general belief that Things Are Going To Hell In A Handbasket.

Often I inherited a mess when I arrived, since I started three out of four positions as an interim. Other crises hit on my watch. In each case, I found out that I am good at stabilizing volatile situations and quietly improving them. I got used to seeing a peculiar expression pass across people's faces as they surprised themselves by enjoying their work and their co-workers again, sort of a puzzled "oh wait, it's okay for me to do this?" look.

I can't claim that I did anything special to get these results. In fact, I think it was the lack of special response that was important. "Stuff happens," I modeled for my teams. "Good stuff, bad stuff, exciting stuff, boring stuff, the works. When it happens, we will acknowledge it, and then we will return to our focus on our mission, our goals, and our desired outcomes." We stayed put.

I don't know how to communicate that determination, that fierceness, in the setting of a job interview. The only adequate word I have for it is "love," a word that is neither professional nor precise. I love organizations and their inevitably imperfect structures, policies and procedures. I love my colleagues, whether I am officially responsible for all of them or not. Above all, I love communities, those intersecting networks of individuals and groups that libraries variously call customers, patrons, clients or service populations.

No, I don't go looking for professional fights, but I don't back down from them, either. As a consequence, I haven't had to have very many. The few that I have had, I haven't lost. I will not allow staff or the library to disrespect patrons; I will not allow staff or patrons to disrespect the library; I will not allow patrons or the library to disrespect staff. I stand in the middle with all of my enthusiasm, cheerfulness, geekiness, humility, compassion, transparency, respect, effectiveness and efficiency--and if anybody wants to cause problems, they have to go through me.

On talking crazy, taking initiative, and having a comprehensive vision

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend Champions of Change, the Voice for Oregon Innovation & Sustainability's business soiree and leadership awards ceremony. It was much larger and more impressive than I had expected--a statement that is both a compliment and an apology to VOIS's all-volunteer organization and the event's many sponsors.

A number of businesspeople, community leaders and politicians spoke briefly. Their priorities and activities offer many possible connections to library programs, collections and services of all types. (The upside of currently being between positions is that I don't have "job blinders" on when attending these kinds of events. The downside is that it is much harder for me to actually act on any of those many possible connections.) What I want to talk about here, though, is three recurring themes that kept appearing in people's comments:

1. When they started out, everybody thought they were crazy. Now, it's just lots of people who think they are crazy.

2. The turning point for them came when they realized that nobody else--not government, not existing businesses, not large foundations--were going to do their work for them.

3. Common wisdom views sustainability and robust economies as competing goals that must be traded off against each other. They view sustainability as a necessary component of robust economies and robust economies as the only reliable guarantors of sustainability.

Anybody who keeps up with current trends in libraryland has to see parallels there. Open access vs. toll access, print vs. electronic, the de-skilling of previously professional positions, patron-driven acquisitions vs. professional selection, controlled vocabularies vs. folksonomies, and on and on. Do we think that we can be independent actors in the face of technological and economic changes? Crazy talk! Are we waiting for vendors, funders or other fields to develop the solutions we need? Bad idea. Do we believe that libraries can only thrive if taxes get raised or profit margins fall? Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't, but we set ourselves up for failure if we can only gain when others lose.

These thoughts have helped me clarify why I had such a visceral reaction to Colleen Harris' "On Learning, Library Evolution, Organizational Change, and the (Occasionally Ugly) Responsibilities of Library Management". (Her post is part of the ongoing discussion about library lay-offs at the University of San Diego, and it contains links to the essential background reading right at the start.) More accurately, I had a visceral reaction to the End Note of her post, which makes the flat claim that:

Libraries are not in the business of keeping people in jobs. We are in the business of meeting our mission of providing information to our users.

Up until then, I was completely, entirely, enthusiastically on board with her analysis of the problem and her recommended improvements to library management practices. And then I turned on her argument. Why? Well, imagine two slight variations:

Libraries are not in the business of recruiting and hiring staff who are members of under-represented groups. We are in the business of meeting our mission of providing information to our users.

Libraries are not in the business of choosing more environmentally sound products and practices. We are in the business of meeting our mission of providing information to our users.

All libraries, unless they are self-supporting through endowments and/or revenues, exist as a support function or vanity project for another institution. As such, our missions are fundamentally contingent upon and accountable to the missions of the institutions that support us. For the majority of these institutions, yes, library management has no warrant to make decisions based on the individual fates of individual employees who will be affected by restructuring or other layoffs. For some institutions, though, they might.

I have been the library director at two such institutions. One was a religious organization, and the other was a university with an official commitment to contemplative administration. The University of San Diego is a Roman Catholic institution with a mission and vision that require its administrators to look beyond mere effectiveness and efficiency when making decisions. Should they also consider individual livelihoods? I can't say, since I am not a member of that specific community or the Roman Catholic tradition more broadly. But it is a valid and important conversation for that community and tradition to have.

To put it another way, consider Verde, the Portland business founded by Alan Hipólito, one of the award-winners at the Champions of Change event. Verde "has brought new environmental investments to Portland’s neighborhoods, involved community members in the planning and building of these investments, and ensured that low-income people and people of color directly benefited from the investments." Is this the model MBA students will learn? No. Could the model be directly transferred to a municipal department? Definitely not. Is it a bad model? No. It is a model that pursues multiple goals simultaneously in alignment with the organization's mission. Management is not only about industry best practices--it is about integrity. The same is as true of libraries as it is of a landscape, nursery and energy efficiency business.

Ithaka Directors' Report, 5 months later

When I saw that this year's Johannah Sherrer Memorial Lecture would be Ithaka's Roger Schonfeld discussing implications of their 2010 "Insights From U.S. Academic Library Directors" report, I knew I needed to go. I had been part of the lively online discussion of the report when it came out, especially cheering to Jenica Rogers' able dissection of it; I wanted to hear what Schonfeld and the responding panel of Lewis & Clark and Reed faculty would have to say.

I did in fact go today, and I am very happy that I did. (Not only for the tasty reception food and meeting new-to-me librarians and library staff after, either.) You know the annoying person at talks who, during the Q&A at the end, uses their time to editorialize instead of actually ask a question? Well, I was all set to be that guy, but I didn't have to, because the panelists beat me to it in their responses.

Susan Glosser pointed out that a shift towards digital resources does not necessarily imply a change in research methodology. (She also observed that "databases are like mushrooms, they are always popping up" and recommended that librarians figure out effective ways of communicating with faculty about new resources.)

Karen Gross pointed out that just because a library function is a lower priority for faculty, it doesn't mean that it isn't important to them. She used the example of going to a discipline-specific online resource first before entering the library physically or virtually: yes, she goes there first, but the very next place she always goes is the library itself. Gross also argued that electronic journals are still print resources, because how do most people read the articles? After printing out a hardcopy. In other words, access is not the same thing as consumption, an especially important consideration when it comes to looking at longer-form texts like electronic books.

Ann Delehanty pointed out that faculty research is not the same thing as student research: not only do faculty not use the library in the same way as students, they don't want their undergraduate students in particular to use the library the same way they do. She gave the example of how she uses her online syllabi as gateways (of the "gateway, buyer, archive" classification of library functions that the Ithaka report used) for student research and how she needs and wants the assistance of librarians in creating these gateways.

Brian Detweiler-Bedell spoke along similar lines, arguing that the library doesn't exist to serve faculty research needs but rather serves "the life of the mind" in all its forms. He talked about how he uses a discipline-specific online resource as a "spigot" to get his research program's information needs from, and how an important part of the library's function is to teach students how to identify which spigots they need to "turn on" for their own research. He recommended using library research case studies as an instructional tool.

Schonfeld's talk itself was interesting, balanced, and highlighted some aspects of the report's findings that I hadn't fully grasped before. I was especially glad that he explicitly noted that while directors' stated priorities were not aligned with faculty's stated priorities, their budget priorities expressed as spending choices certainly were. I had wondered if this pattern is simply a reflection of the political reality that grumpy faculty can make the lives of Deans and Provosts far more unpleasant than grumpy librarians can, and since most academic library directors report to some sort of Dean or Provost type of person, they know what their organizational constraints are.

Which gives a new poignancy to the Ithaka report's finding that only 35% of academic library directors consider themselves to have a "well-developed plan" to deal with changing user attitudes and expectations. Having observed both the theatrical tendencies of library strategic planning and the futility of expecting any kind of unified faculty opinion on anything, I can understand why some directors figure, consciously or not, that it's a poor use of time and resources to develop initiatives that will inevitably run afoul of some constituency that will end up killing them or modifying them down into triviality. I don't approve of that kind of fatalism, but I have a new sympathy for a position that previously only baffled me.

On the other hand, I could be wrong...

...about the unlikelihood of open source at the enterprise level.

Inside Higher Ed reports that Cornell and a handful of other universities have committed "to fully adopt the Kuali Financial System, an open-source application." A sign of things to come? Maybe. I don't know about Cornell's peer adopters, but the fact that Cornell switched from "homegrown financial software" seems significant to me. It suggests a pre-existing organizational culture of owning one's own headaches. Also, financial management software is only one step towards an entire open-source ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite.

So: I'm intrigued, but not yet convinced that open source is a trend.

Open source is not a trend (Library technology thoughts, pt. 8 of 8)

Back when I started this series, I noted my surprise and disappointment with the fact that I couldn't, in good faith, include open source software as a trend. Surprise, because library-vendor economics are brutal, and more and more librarians are going to decide that if we are going to have headaches with our tools no matter what, they might as well really be our headaches. Disappointment, because I have tried to move our library [shouldn't link to back-end database] tools [just in case] to open source whenever possible.

However: remember the idea that the headaches would be our headaches? It turns out it only works if there is a consistent "we." People keep leaving. In the case of the archives, positions have been eliminated after incumbents moved on. IT officially doesn't support our fringe Linux set-ups, and turnover at IT has meant that our unofficial support has mostly evaporated too. That back-end database I'm not providing a URL for? We actually haven't been able to get into it for months, because a) nobody on staff can trouble-shoot it, b) it supports services the university has largely de-funded, and c) the position responsible for getting an outside contractor to fix it was vacant from February to June. (For that position, MySQL experience was a preferred qualification. Out of roughly 60 applicants, maybe one had it. In my corner of libraryland, at least, we can't pay for the skills we need.) Maybe larger institutions can pull it off. Maybe consortia can pull it off. I'm not sure. Before they can, though, there are all kinds of organizational culture changes that need to happen first, and the few signs I have seen of that have been sloooooow. (Now is an especially good time to point at the Library Loon's post on the exodus of tech-savvy librarians.)

I am not saying the situation is necessarily so much worse than when we were using proprietary software. But it isn't better, and libraries need to get better on the tech side. That is kind of the whole point of this series of blog posts. Given the brutal library-vendor economics referenced above, and the independent incentives to merge library systems with course management and enterprise systems, I don't see long-term institutional support for the creation and maintenance of library-specific open-source tools. (Not that short-term support is so strong either; we're about a year past the point where the promised reserves module for our hosted Koha ILS was supposed to come online, entirely because of funding cuts at supporting libraries.) While open source is happening in CMS, I can't see it happening at the enterprise level, like, ever--so, yeah, not a trend. It pains me to say it, greatly. Hopefully someone has a good counterargument?

Library tech: too important to leave to the librarians? (Library technology thoughts, pt. 6 of 8)

(I have a list of six predictions about what I expect to see happen in academic library technology over the next 5-10 years. This is prediction #5.)

Administrators and accreditors will drive technological change in academic libraries more than faculty will.

When I was making my list of predictions, I thought this was more distinctive than it necessarily is. It is largely a restatement of the accountability regime I talked about with user satisfaction. But it is also a statement about shared governance, and that statement is: whatever power administrators do or don't share with faculty, it will be power that they choose to share, making a system of delegated rather than shared governance. If that delegation even happens. More likely is that faculty senates and committees will continue their slow descent into advisory status.

This descent is one of the reasons I have trouble understanding the perennial libraryland debate about tenure for academic librarians. Even if tenure put us on equal footing with teaching faculty--which I'm not convinced it does or can--I am not sure why we want to be pushing for a status with diminishing rights and responsibilities. We need to stand on our own professional profile of skills and principles.

The shifting balance of governance will be especially significant when it comes to technology. Technology is expensive. It is expensive all the time. You buy it, you tweak it, you babysit it, you perform CPR on it, you replace it. Or you let it go bad and deal with the time and energy expense of really angry users. Whatever you do or don't do with technology, it is going to cost you.

Which means that administrators will pay close attention to it. There has been a lot of talk about how faculty will react if the Georgia State e-reserves case goes badly, but I am more interested in how administrators will react if they decide the library is an area of legal exposure for their institutions. In a different area, accessibility and assistive technology, what I have seen motivate policies and budgets is concern about ADA lawsuits. Very broadly speaking, from my limited experience, faculty will want their electronic reserves and won't want to divert resources for accessibility away from, say, journal subscriptions (or inflated "permission fees" to the CCC). Administrators will want the legal risk to go away. Faculty may or may not get the results they want, but if they do, it will be because administrators made a choice about how grumpy a faculty (and student body) they can afford to have. Where librarians fall on that pecking order, I don't really like to think about too much.

Thoughts on power, privilege, and Steven Abram's latest

Today, unlike most weeks, I have to leave work early to pick my son up from school and take him to soccer practice. So this morning I approached my paraprofessional colleague who's in the library with me today and asked if she would be willing to stay an extra 30 minutes to close up. She said no problem; it was all very friendly and informal. But the reality of the situation is, I could have made her stay. It would have been unethical and inadvisable, and if I did it too many times I would likely get in trouble with HR, but I could have done it. Meanwhile, if she were the one who needed to leave early and I said no, she would be up the creek without a paddle.

That's power.

If I were talking to a group of other managers about my crazy schedule this week, and how I needed to leave early on Friday, and oh by the way one of my staff closed up for me, most likely nobody would blink. If I were talking to a group of paraprofessionals about it, most likely nobody would feel comfortable suggesting that it might have been inconsiderate of me, or that of course my colleague said yes, what, did I think she was stupid?

That's privilege.

***

The past day or so there have been several LSW friendfeed discussions sparked by Stephen Abram's call for professional civility. In these discussions, people have expressed frustration with how powerful and privileged individuals don't see how often they move from a discussion of why people are unhappy with what those individuals have said and done to a discussion of why the unhappy people can't express themselves more respectfully. Since saying things "the right way" is, in practice, very often an impossibility for people who don't already share the same power and privilege--e.g., women are either "too passive" or "too bitchy," African-Americans and Latino/as are either "keeping to themselves" or "trying to take over"--many of us are immediately distrustful when someone goes to the "Tone Argument" without providing specific examples of where they think someone else has crossed a line of acceptable behavior. (These kinds of things happen so often, people make bingo cards.)

Stephen Abram, to his credit, has been an active participant in these discussions. He clearly has a thick skin and a healthy sense of respect for differing opinions. Where he falls short in understanding people's objections, in my view, is that he believes that the opinions of himself or Jeff Trzeciak or other library luminaries are competing on a level playing field with everybody else's. In one LSW thread, he comments:

It's certainly not my right or position to tell anyone on this list or anywhere how to behave but I feels it my right to express an opinion or preference. Is it because I'm an old white guy that I am relegated to that limiting box of behaviour that I only get positioned as telling people how to behave? Are all old white males stereotyped thusly? Are we the last safe place to pre-judge our opinions and positions? We can't all be equal until everyone is equal.

Considering that he describes himself on his blog as "ably capable of providing tips and techniques for strategic thinking and innovation in libraries...uniquely positioned to spark ideas and insights," I find it difficult to take seriously his claim that his voice is just one among many equals. After all, he doesn't get paid to give keynotes and such because he's just another librarian. No: he is invited to speak because people pay attention to what he has to say. His reputation and professional track record give him both power and privilege.

***

Once upon a time, two people I admired and respected had a falling-out. One was, among other things, an editor at a small science-fiction publication. The other was, among other things, an author of published science-fiction short stories. The editor said something in a public space that could reasonably be interpreted as an indictment of the writer's ability to produce compelling stories. The writer objected, vigorously. The editor's defense was that they were not speaking from their position as an editor, who makes buying decisions and influences other editors and readers, but as a private individual. The writer called bullshit. Although I had a longer association with the editor, I agreed with the writer. When one takes on a professional role, one does not have the option of putting it on and taking it off at will. There is no such thing as speaking privately in public.

This lesson is one of the first I learned in my career, when I became director of a small public library less than a year out of grad school. When I was eating dinner in a local restaurant, I wasn't just me, I was the library director. When I was joking around with staff, I wasn't just me, I was the library director. When I wrote a letter to the editor in support of the mayor, I wasn't just me, I was the library director. People paid a lot more attention to me than I had really expected them to.

And they were right to. If I said that I hated romance novels, they could worry about what that would mean for library acquisitions. If I said my wife and I were choosing not to put our son in daycare because we were concerned about studies that suggested there could be negative long-term effects for him, they could worry about whether I would give a fair opportunity to job applicants who had small children in daycare. I had the power, however limited, to affect other people's lives. I like to think that I was (and am) a competent professional who only uses my powers for good. But I learned that I had to be constantly demonstrating my competence and responsibility. If I gave an opinion, I had to explicitly affirm differing opinions and openly acknowledge that I would not use my power against them. If I gave an opinion, I had to consciously remind myself and others that I knew my privilege might keep them from openly disagreeing with me.

It took longer for me to learn that the power and privilege that came from my role were directly related to the privilege I had from being white, male and married to someone of a different gender, because it greatly increased my chances of being selected for that role. But I learned that lesson too.

***

I suppose I could chafe at the constraints this reality puts on my words and actions. I could grumble that I have to respond constructively to complaints from staff and patrons that aren't always the most diplomatically phrased. But it is part of the package deal that comes with holding a position of responsibility, and I accept it. I wish other people would too--especially individuals who have a lot more influence, and therefore a lot more responsibility, than I do.

Meme (?) : For the record

Following Jenica Rogers...

• I will turn 38 in 3 months.
• I've never been in a tenure-track position. I do have "faculty status for the purposes of governance and service," though. That happened when I was 33.
• I’ve been in the profession since 1993 — 18 years. I’ve had jobs outside of libraries when I've had multiple jobs at one time, but working at Wendy's after my freshman year of college is the last time I was without a library job.
• I’ve had my MLIS since 1998 — 13 years this August.
• I started supervising library staff when I was 26, in my first MLS-required job. Some of them had their MLS too, even though none of their positions required it.
  
• I started managing budgets when I was 26, in my first MLS-required job.
• I had my first grant application approved when I was 26, in my first MLS-required job. Biggest grant to date: $1.2 million, approved when I was 29.
• I presented at my first local conference when I was 31, and I will be 38 when I present at my first national (ish) one later this spring.

Jenica says, "Each and every one of those milestones was scary, and challenging, and I didn’t feel 'ready' for any of them." Can I relate! I went basically from grad school to being a public library director. Then I became a church library director and discovered that I was actually more of an associate pastor for adult education. Then I became an academic library director and had to learn everything about faculty culture and IL instruction and, well, everything. There are rewards to going from zero to 60 in a short period of time, but feeling like an expert is not one of them. Jenica is right: just get in there and start doing what matters to you. I promise you, it feels much better to struggle with something you care about than to breeze through something you're indifferent to.