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.

Would you look at that? It's a new year already.

The original title for this post was going to be, "The system worked." Then I was going to go with, "I'm still not sure what hit me." Suffice to say: December was one wild and crazy ride. I am not complaining about where it left me when I got off, though. Everything that happened made sense and was handled quickly, competently and compassionately. Some people who will remain nameless have officially impressed me. (I would say, "You know who you are," but the likelihood that any of them are reading this post? Small.)

Some other people impressed me too, and I get to name them, because I will be working with them! Starting this week, I will be joining Free Geek as their Human Resources Administrator. I will be a member of the management collective. I have mixed feelings about leaving libraries, at least for the time being, but not about my new position. The HR aspects of being a library administrator were among my favorites--and, heck, for the first seven and a half years of my career, I functioned as the HR department for my library. Systems and forms and documentation and wrasslin' with external bureaucratic forces that mere mortals should never have disturbed? OMG So. Very. Sweet. And Free Geek's mission is right up my alley.

My family had some concern about the, shall we say, poor image of HR folks in our society. I completely understand. Livelihood, health, dignity, long-term security--is there anything HR can't threaten for an organization's employees? I tried to explain that HR work appeals to me for precisely that reason. Wherever there is a function that can provoke hostility and anxiety, I want to be there to mitigate them at the least and to help re-engineer things to eliminate them at best. (At the top of my library wish list during this past job search? Circulation and scholarly communication.) If "thankless" is an adjective commonly used to describe a particular job, chances are I'd jump at the opportunity to do it.

I will probably still write about library stuff here on this blog. In some ways, it will be easier now that I'm not responsible for any actual libraries. I don't have as much of a personal stake in how my comments are perceived by other librarians. Which feels kind of freeing, and also kind of daunting: appropriate feelings for the start of a new year, it seems to me.

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.

Why do you want this job?

When I moved to Portland with my family in late August, I had to leave my former job as well. It wasn't a surprise for me or my employer, so I had already been job-hunting, but I really kicked up the pace when I was officially unemployed. Which I still am.

This post is not a complaint about the dire state of the economy or the fiercely competitive library job market. These things are real, but they are rarely the fault of the people making hiring decisions, and they are never the fault of the other folks out there in the candidate pools.

This post is an opinion about a specific dynamic that I have observed during interviews. I admit I am not the most objective observer here; I could easily be projecting my own insecurities and anxieties onto these interactions or exaggerating what is actually happening. Still, it seems worth discussing.

First, some basic data. Here is a breakdown of interviews I have had in the past two and a half months or have scheduled to happen in the near future:

CATEGORY	PHONE INTERVIEWS	IN-PERSON INTERVIEWS
Academic libraries	1	0
Public libraries	2	2
Higher ed - administrative	1	1
Non-profit - administrative	1	0
Sales/management	0	3
Temporary - miscellaneous	1	2

It adds up to fourteen interviews for nine positions, five of which are still live possibilities. (Comparing anecdata with people, I have been very fortunate.) Almost every interview has included some variant on the question, "Why do you want this job?" or "What is your dream job?" The clear sense I have usually gotten is that I will be shooting myself in the foot if I don't present myself as treasuring the position at hand over all other possibilities. Just by the range of positions I am interviewing for, one can see how I would have difficulty doing so without a lot of contrivance.

Here is the thing: I do have a dream job. Two of them, actually. Neither requires an MLS, though an MLS is a great asset for either, in my opinion. Neither is feasible for me at this point in my life, because each requires yet more graduate school and some serious geographic flexibility. Am I therefore a reluctant or less-qualified candidate for the positions I am interviewing for? No, and, I don't think so, respectively.

My profession is connecting people with resources. I enjoy it immensely and find it personally fulfilling and professionally interesting. My career so far suggests that I am good at it. I just hope that being open to and excited by diverse opportunities within my profession will not, in the end, close off opportunities for 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.