admin – Page 3 – Caveat Lector

Silenced

I had a post all ready to go in response to Rachel’s query about private reactions to public questioning of sexism in library technology. It was an outspoken philippic in the best CavLec tradition of unabashed, fiery candor.

After writing it and saving it as a draft, I got up, walked around the apartment a bit, hopped on the exercise bike and drove it the fastest mile I think I’ve ever driven it, walked around the apartment some more, did a stretch or two, ate some tortilla chips by way of comfort food, sat down again, opened a new post window, and started transplanting the least-inflammatory segments of that draft into this post.

For the record, Rachel, I noticed exactly the behavior you did. I’ve gotten email aplenty on this subject. What’s more, when I politely urged some of my correspondents to take their aptly-expressed concerns and experiences public (for mailing-list values of “public”), what I heard without exception was, “Oh, I can’t—I have to work with guys like that. It’ll play merry hell with my daily worklife.”

I talked last week with another library blogger who’s written on this subject. She’s leery of writing more, though she said she’s got more to say. She’s got plenty of work and personal crises on her plate; why should she sign up for one more crisis?

I explained in my own prior post on the matter that I’d kept another fine, fiery post in draft instead of publishing it. I explained why I did that. It’s worth noting, I think, that after the post I did have the cojones (thanks for the mot juste, Karen!) to publish, two #code4lib members, wholly independently of each other as far as I know, told me that my “airing dirty laundry in public” (direct quote) had angered a third member. Would I please smooth it over, asked one. Next time I ought to talk to the principals first, said the other.

Is it a coincidence that Rachel was the first to ask publicly about the public-private divide in women’s behavior around this? I don’t think so, not at all; Rachel doesn’t work in a library. I do. I surely do fear for my career if I stir up the kind of tornado that I was about to, the kind of storm that if you ask me, this problem deserves.

There’s a pattern here, I will make bold to assert. It’s not just that female systems librarians who have dealt with misogyny and sexism (and I’ve rarely met one who hasn’t) are leery of speaking up about it, though goodness knows that’s hideous enough. It’s that we are actively being silenced, even by extremely decent people who mean nothing but good.

That’s just ugly. Silence doesn’t fix this. Pluralistic ignorance (“oh, nobody else is complaining, so it must be just me”) doesn’t fix it. Fear doesn’t fix it—not fear of saying it, and definitely not fear of hearing it said.

And so now I’ve silenced myself, too. Twice now—quite a bit more than twice if you count the experiences I’ve shut up about, never mind the stories I’ve heard and would like to retell. I’m so frustrated and angry about all the things I want to talk about but don’t dare to—horrible ironies, jawdropping disrespect, absurd defensiveness, common and damaging pushback—that I’m ready to shed burning, acid tears. I want to talk; I want to be heard. I’m deathly tired of this knot of sorrow-laced wrath that wound itself up somewhere underneath my sternum months ago, churning destructively away ever since.

I’m lucky, though. This isn’t a workplace issue for me, thank goodness; it’s only come up in communities of practice. I think that’s what frees me to say as much as I’ve said, just as I noted that it frees Rachel. Sure, I worry about my future marketability, but at least I don’t have to worry about my present job!

I’m lucky to have gotten where I am at all, I now begin to understand. I’m so lucky that Allen and Jerry and Jon and Gene and James and the rest of the PSWG techies held to mannerly and honest standards of personal behavior. Their open respect for me led directly to what I now do, and I do, in spite of everything I’ve just said, love what I do.

Grunch and the library coder

Karen G. Schneider asks two provocative questions:

Provocative questions #1: are women less willing to do what it takes to get to a conference, get recognized, get published? As a group, are we shy about being Shameless Hussies?

Provocative questions #2: are they-what-does-the-pickin’ less likely to recognize women for their ability to contribute to current issues? Is the bar set higher for women? (Note how I didn’t single out one gender here.)

I tell y’all what, I never expected to apply these two CavLec categories to the same post. Going into a woman-dominated profession, woo-hoo! Surely that’s an escape from the tech-boy locker room!

Yeah. Not so much.

It doesn’t help to be in a profession with a deep-rooted distrust of technology, to begin with. Like it or not, this profession attracts a lot of technophobes, and they tend to be pretty shrill about it, and they’re not unlikely to be in positions of power (hello, Mr. G-rm-n). A friend of mine at JCDL who came to librarianship from IT had an appallingly hard time finding work. She’s smart, capable, and trained, so what happened? Distrust, if you ask me. Technogeeks aren’t real librarians, don’t you know; we’re there to be targets for the aggro that everyone else displaces from the machines on their desks.

I’ve seen the weirdest and silliest jealousy from professional colleagues (not all female, I should say). I told the thirty-second version of my career story (“crapped out of grad school, worked in e-publishing and typesetting for a while, went to library school, am a librarian”) to some professional colleagues some time ago. “Going to library school? Not your smartest decision ever,” said one frankly.

Maybe not. But I knew what I was getting into, and I chose it, and for me it was the right choice. I didn’t say that, because I didn’t feel right questioning what my colleague felt about the field. I just said “Too late now,” and shrugged off the idea advanced by another colleague that I could have had a much more lucrative career in IT. (The hell I could. Non-IT people have very strange notions about what it takes to have an IT career—beating things with rocks doesn’t cut it, folks—not to mention how much an IT career actually pays these days.)

So there isn’t just a glass ceiling in librarianship (and there is a well-documented glass ceiling; this profession is majority female, but its administrators are majority male). There’s a glass wall, between women and systems librarianship. Subtle and not-so-subtle peer pressure telling us that them geeks, they’re Not Us.

Yeah, and how ’bout those geek guys, huh? Huh?

I’m going to pick on #code4lib, because there’s some vague hope they’ll forgive me. I’m not picking on them because they’re bad people. I’m picking on them because I think the story is illustrative of some dark corners in tech librarianship. #code4lib is an IRC channel for people who do things with computer code in libraries. It isn’t all MLS-holding librarians; it includes some straight-up coders sans MLS. It isn’t all men, either, though I can count female regulars (on the channel, at any rate; the affiliated mailing list has more female participation) on one hand.

So the #code4libbers decided ’round about last November or December or thereabouts that they were going to whomp up a little ol’ conference for themselves. In February. It happened, and the organizers were all very proud of themselves. Approximate ratio of men to women attendees, last I heard, was eight or nine to one. For a tech conference, not so bad, believe it or not. For a librarian conference, abysmal.

It doesn’t take active malice to marginalize women; simple thoughtlessness is often enough. I hope and believe spur-of-the-moment con organization isn’t widespread practice, because it’s a practice that excludes women. Like it or not, women generally have more household responsibilities than men, and are significantly less able to drop everything for a spur-of-the-moment con. (I can, mind you, but I’m childfree. My husband is more than competent to take care of himself and the Goths.) Librarianship can’t fix what goes on in librarians’ homes, but librarianship can and should work around it. That means plenty of notice for cons.

But hey, it gets better. I have the chat transcript for the episode I’m about to recount, though I don’t mean to share it unless I am accused of lying. (Which has been known to happen to other bloggers in similar circumstances.)

In the course of conference planning, a thoughtlessly sexist joke headline went up on the conference web page. It was called to the attention of a male code4libber by his female boss. He came to the IRC channel to complain, and to do him credit, he was honestly unhappy for reasons other than having been embarrassed in front of her.

He was stonewalled. Pushed back at, hard. “So what, they aren’t letting you go anyway.” (I couldn’t make that one up if I tried.) “I think it’s in how you look at it.” (Um, yeah.) “I don’t think personally it is that extreme.” (Someone’s boss did. But she’s a woman, so, um, what, she doesn’t count?) “Umm, are you on drugs, dude?” (Again with the I couldn’t make this up.)

And I was there for the whole thing, and I spoke up briefly in support of the guy complaining, and nobody paid me two hoots’ worth of attention. The headline was, however, changed. Under protest.

So that’s what we deal with, you know what I’m saying? I left code4lib not long after that. I had a long, angry CavLec post all ready for the ether, but I held it until after the con because my loyalties were divided—hell yeah I am a feminist, and hell yeah I will say so; but I am also a library technologist, and I thought that con was an important step, and I wanted to see it succeed. I was torn.

My absence was noticed. People emailed me about it. I was pretty frank. Eventually, I was enticed back, and for the most part, people have cut out the crap (that being hardly the first instance of random sexist stupidity I’d witnessed there). So the post’s sat in my draft queue ever since. Trust me, this version? Is highly condensed and bowdlerized.

Yeah. So my answer to Karen’s question one is: hell yes we are unwilling to put up with this garbage if it’s the price of visibility. And that’s our problem? I think not. We need to move the focus off women’s behavior (which is generally damn logical and reasonable, you ask me) and onto the environments that women are not finding congenial.

I am not a shameless hussy. I damn well shouldn’t have to be, either.

Question two is a good one, and thanks to Karen for asking it and to Jane for seconding it louder than a whisper. Rather than answer it, I’d rather focus on what we can do about it. Call it a good old-fashioned consciousness-raising.

I’m on the programming committee for the next code4libcon. First thing on the to-do list was lining up potential keynoters. So what’d I do? I stacked the deck, hell yes I did—of thirteen candidates, seven are women. Did it work? Of the current top three vote-getters, one is a woman (and yeah, she was one of my nominees). We’re looking at two, maybe three keynotes, so the odds look good.

We can stack the odds. If we care, we have to, because damn straight these geek guys aren’t gonna do it for us. If you’re shy, you don’t even have to put yourself forward. We can talk each other up. We should. And we need to resist every temptation to cut each other down; “united we stand” and all that fun stuff.

The other thing we need to do is get over this “I’m not techie enough!” fixation that a lot of us have (and yeah, I’m prone to it too). One of my good friends won’t go anywhere near #code4lib—not because I’ve complained about the atmosphere, but because “I’m not techie enough.” C’mon. Techies are just people. Just librarians, some of ’em. If we don’t knock the rough edges off ’em, who’s going to? If we don’t learn from them, where will we learn? If we don’t join them, who will?

So. There’s my story, and there are my thoughts, and there are my recommendations. How about yours?

ALA: Let’s destroy the profession!

Golly, said ALA. There’s small libraries all over the country who need low-cost librarian assistance. And there’s a ton of young eager-beavers with MLSes who need library experience to land their first Real Jobs. That gives us an idea! Let’s…

… ask our retired post-career people to work for free! Yeah, that’s the ticket!

I could try to find words for this profession-destroying folly. I could try. You would not want me to try. Even on CSS Naked Day, the words I would find would be too much for a mostly PG-13 weblog. Go read the commenters at Jessamyn’s; they found a few words.

Let’s settle for “unconscionably stupid and counterproductive.” If you want any kind of profession at all in fifteen or twenty years, you need young people, not post-retirement people, doing professional work in libraries. If you want any kind of profession now, you need not to give away professional labor; the decree of capitalism is that an employer not pay for whatever labor he can get for nothing.

But that begs a question. It assumes ALA wants a profession. I don’t know that ALA does, frankly. Its actions, speaking as always louder than words, point toward inexorable deprofessionalization in public and school libraries. Academic libraries are likely to hold out longer, but academic librarians aren’t immune either; we’re starting to be replaced with the Ph.Ds displaced by deprofessionalization in academia. (Funny sometimes, how the threads of my life weave together, innit?)

Sucks for librarians, but hey, library schools stay full (until prospective students find out that the emperor’s nekkid, anyway) and libraries get the same dedicated people half-off their already low, low prices! And it is the American Library Association, let’s not forget; it is explicitly allied with our trainers and our employers, not with us.

Lordy, I do hope UW-SLIS has the sense to tenure Greg Downey. I’m gladder than ever to have taken his Information and Labor course. I wish SLIS would see fit to let him offer it online; I would make all my friends take it, so I would! And hey, all you ALAers, I have an idea too—let’s make the course a prerequisite for running for ALA Council! A profession is more than a set of ethics and ideals, damn it, it is an economic construct, and it’s past time ALA figured that out.

Look, librarians, let’s not be patsies, okay? If you’re a young librarian in ALA, figure out what your complaint options are and use them. If you’re a young librarian outside ALA, tell ALA that this kind of crap is why they don’t get your money. (ALA, this kind of crap is why you don’t get my money; you suck unbelievably at defending the value of professional librarianship, if indeed you believe there is any value to it at all. There, I just did.)

If you’re a retiree, don’t just give away your work, your prestige, and your experience, as though you were some wet-behind-the-ears intern! Demand that ALA vouchsafe you the respect you deserve. Then tell the program officers for this ALA travesty (starting with LITA exec director Mary Taylor, mentioned in the RFP) what ALA should be doing: offering internship opportunities to the next generation. Even better, find a NextGen librarian who needs the experience (trust me, it isn’t hard!) and hold him or her up as an example.

Don’t let ALA put a bullet in librarianship’s back. Please.

Prefer experience to education

So I’ve got another couple friends now who are dipping their toes into the first-job water, and finding that water mighty cold. Fairly typically, they are thinking about going back for post-graduate education.

I don’t think that’s wise, and I’ve said so. Remains to be seen whether they listen.

I’ll say it right out. Once you have a bachelor’s degree, experience matters more than education. A ton of education without experience looks suspicious to employers, and I can’t say I disagree, because of all the folks who flee into graduate school to avoid the bruising slog that is the first-job search. Who wants to hire frightened people? (Answer: nobody you want to work for, trust me.)

Thing is, the search for a first job is always, always, always a slog. If you’re going to grad school because you think a job will just magically fall into your lap afterwards, please, please don’t. It won’t happen, and you’ll just end up hating graduate school and hating yourself for going.

Go do some work first. There’s lots of work out there that doesn’t require any particular specialization. If you don’t know where it is, your first job is to find out. And yes, a lot of that work sucks, but that doesn’t mean you don’t learn from it.

My new-librarian acquaintance is still looking. I know her pretty well, and as much as I want her to find a job, I find myself stopping short of actually recommending her to people. I myself wouldn’t hire her. It’s not even the lack of experience—it’s all the rough edges that a first job knocks off you that she still has, and the ceaseless virulent childish cynicism that would make her terrible to share an office with.

I don’t know how to fix that. Any suggestion from me that her attitude is part of the problem is only going to be met with—you know, attitude. But I’d lay odds that if she’d had a few jobs in her early 20s, she wouldn’t be languishing without so much as callbacks now.

Given the choice between a bad job and a bad graduate education, always take the job; at least it pays you, whereas you have to pay professors to maltreat you. Given the choice between a bad job and a decent graduate education—if you have no work experience, take the job. It’ll be worth far more in the job market than the additional degree. I absolutely guarantee it.

What do I do now?

I got another “Straight Talk” fanmail today, this one asking rather diffidently if I would be willing to suggest some next steps after leaving graduate school. I’m not exactly a Horatio Alger story, but what the hell, I’ve got some disorganized thoughts, so why not?

The immediate need, of course, is for positive cash flow, which means work. Any work. Whatever work you can land; you won’t be doing it forever anyway. Temp agencies, limited-term work (colleges, universities, and government are major sources of this), waitronning, (the dreaded) retail, whatever. Just stop the financial bleeding, however you can.

You can’t afford to be disdainful of the workaday world at this point. In fact, in my experience the folks who have the worst time transitioning out of academia are the ones who never let go of it. Temping and retail are beneath them, they’re horribly underpaid for their intelligence and (perceived) social status, and every day they haul themselves home from work lamenting their former role and status as academicians. If this is you, train yourself out of it. It will blind you to opportunity where you are, waste precious brain-cycles that deserve better use, and make you so bitter and miserable that you may damage yourself permanently. Grieve if you need to, work through what happened to you if you need to (I did both), but don’t define yourself by your old academic identity. That’s gone. Time to roll up your sleeves and start building something else.

What’s more, that precise brand of disdain for the non-academic is what the rest of us hate most when we see it in academia. You won’t be doing yourself any favors in your workplace if you exhibit it; you must respect non-academic work and the people who do it. A well-honed curiosity will help you here. Do you know what a comptroller or a mid-level manager or a sysadmin actually does with her day? Well, don’t be contemptuous—watch and learn instead.

You must also respect time and experience (rather than hurdle-jumping) as determiners of one’s height on the employment totem pole. The people around you did their time as peons while you were in grad school. You need to do your time now; this is part of the opportunity cost you’re paying, and there’s no point in feeling all self-righteously indignant at it.

If you don’t see yourself in the previous few paragraphs, good for you! If you’re anything like me, you’ll get quite a charge out of becoming self-sufficient. Treasure that new confidence; it’s an asset.

If possible, the strategic thing to do is find work that will let you check off the ticky-box beside “supervisory experience” on future applications. If this means riding herd on slackjawed teenagers, so be it. This is the one thing I didn’t do during my topsy-turvy years that I wish I had. The other thing you want out of your first job(s) are good references—people future employers can call who will say nice things about you. Try to avoid working at places that “don’t give references.” Do so if you must, but you’re hurting yourself some.

I don’t usually have to tell ex-grad-students to be frugal, or how to be frugal. We already know how. Once you start having a bit of extra money, pay down your debts and build up your savings. You broke academia’s chains; why do you want the bank chaining you up? Set yourself free. Pay off your debts as fast as you can.

Once you’re solvent and indefinitely (if not necessarily ideally) employed, you can start looking around you a bit to see how the world works. See somebody doing a job you like? Ask them how they got there. Read blogs whose authors talk about their workplaces. Read the business pages in the local newspaper, especially the squibs about small local companies you won’t have heard of. Go to your public library and read the job ads in trade publications (it’s okay to start with newspapers, but you know what they say—that’s only a sliver of the available jobs).

Lots of books purport to tell you what you’ll be good at and enjoy doing. Any public-library reference librarian can help you find them. I never got much use out of them myself, but de gustibus non disputandum est—and I lucked into what I wanted to do anyway, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with these books to begin with. The one book I will recommend specifically is Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity (discussed briefly here), which advocates selecting a career path through varied experience rather than navel-gazing.

It may take years before you land the Ideal (enough) Job. You may cycle through several other jobs (I certainly did). You’ll probably make some mistakes (boy, did I ever!). You may need more education or specialized training. You almost certainly have to do some time on the bottom of the totem-pole. Back to basics: as long as you keep your financial head above water in the meantime, the occasional misstep or blind alley won’t kill you. You’re not in academia any more, so one strike doesn’t send you to the dugout forever. Stand up, dust off your knees, and get back out there.

That’s what I’ve got. For the most part, it’s what I did, and it worked out fine. There’s nothing special about me, either. When I left grad school, I was a shell-shocked zombie with damn-all by way of useful work experience. If I can get this far, most people reading this can probably surpass me.

And I hope they do.

Your own size

Where Gorman slipped, in my opinion—completely aside from the basic vileness of what he said—was ignoring the foundational rule for spokespeople in positions of power: pick on people your own size or larger.

The blogging flap? Was stupid, and handled stupidly afterwards. But it wasn’t overly offensive, or indeed offensive at all. We bloggers can speak up for ourselves. We librarian bloggers are on a roughly even social field with Gorman; we’re certainly not socially disadvantaged in any way. So if he just had to pick a target, we were a good choice.

Google? Also a good choice. Outweighs the ALA by several financial orders of magnitude. Can definitely defend itself. And has absolutely made itself a fair target for scrutiny by its actions lately.

Hip-hop? Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, really bad choice.

Picking on a particular form or genre of entertainment is dicey enough to begin with; you’re automatically alienating its fans, so you’d better have darned good reason and a darned good argument. There are arguments to be made against some forms of entertainment, certainly. Hip-hop itself has a fair bit to answer for by way of misogyny, for instance. But Gorman wasn’t anywhere near there; he likened hip-hop to simple-mindedness. I honestly don’t see any other way to read that but as covert racism. The form itself doesn’t justify the label; good hip-hop has sophisticated wordplay going on that my sadly-overeducated self can’t even begin to match. Nor is there the least shred of actual evidence, I wish I didn’t need to say, correlating listening to (or performing) hip-hop with any sort of intellectual atrophy.

Picking on a form of entertainment that’s racially coded? Do I even need to say how ill-considered that is? (Apparently I do, ’cuz no one else has!) It’s the classic gesture of unconsidered privilege. Those Other People, I don’t have to respect their stuff; they just have to respect mine.

If Gorman wanted to pick on somebody for simple-mindedness, just as a strategic decision he ought to have chosen, say, science-fiction fans. (Fantasy is right out—female-coded, so invites accusations of sexism.) There’s certainly a long-standing tradition of misogyny in science-fiction, so if that was the basis for Gorman’s hip-hop remark (and I don’t think it was, nor do I think that justifies the remark even if true), the rhetorical gesture is more or less equivalent.

More importantly, though, science-fiction fans cross genders, races, sexualities, and most other sensitive demographic categories. They are also quite capable of hitting back.

Cheap shots aren’t overly honorable to begin with (and I say this as shouldn’t, I know). If the ALA is pondering an intervention with Gorman (and by now they’d better be), the quickest and most effective rule would be “cut out the cheap shots.” But if you’re in the mood, at least pick a halfway-honorable target. Otherwise, you come across like Gorman—a blindly privileged, insensitive bully.

Why I’ll quit ALA

I’m worried about this post, let me just say that up front. I don’t want to be anybody’s poster child, and I’m not out to make anybody angry at me who isn’t already. Nor am I the best person to take on this particular windmill. Even so—in my estimation, some things have to be said that aren’t being said, and faute de mieux, I’ll say some of ’em and hope other people pick up lances of their own.

I am furious—apoplectic—with Michael Gorman over this remark in a Chronicle of Higher Ed interview:

That does not mean that everything can be dumbed down to some kind of hip-hop or bells-and-whistles kind of stuff.

The library world, despite the valiant efforts of many, is one of America’s Great Honky Bastions. I’m sadly, appallingly, vilely pasty-faced white. I can count the non-white librarians, proto-librarians, and library educators I know without moving from my fingers to my toes. (Remove Asians and Asian-Americans from that list, and all I need is one hand. Sad.) We don’t have a great deal of room to protest our ideological purity, either, what with the stunningly racist (still!) organization of our most-used classification and cataloguing vocabularies.

It is simply not acceptable for an ALA spokesperson to use a musical genre associated with African-Americans as a term of opprobrium. I don’t care that Gorman presumably didn’t mean to be offensive. He was. He implied with crystal clarity that hip-hop and its listeners are simple-minded. In what world is that all right?

Worse still, I’ve seen some rolled eyes among the ALA-associated blogsphere, but that’s all. The foray against bloggers earned more attention and vastly more anger, which appalls me. I was hoping not to have to write this post, because I’m late to the game; I thought other bloggers would pick this up. Apparently not.

From ALA itself? Nothing. “Diversity is one of the five key action areas adopted by the American Library Association to fulfill its mission of providing the highest quality library and information services for all people,” according to the ALA’s own website, but I haven’t heard a single peep out of the actual Diversity Office about this. Maybe someone’s staging a private intervention with Gorman. I hope so. But even if that’s the case, it’s not enough.

I’d have to see an awful lot of good works coming out of an organization before I made the conscious decision to overlook such a vile utterance from its leadership, especially when neither the leader nor the organization has the courtesy and good sense to apologize loudly and publicly for it.

What do I see? A complacent, sclerotic, myopic mess with (usually) good intentions and (almost always) abominable execution. An organization in which the answer to deprofessionalization is recruitment. An organization that can’t or won’t embrace open-access publication despite its members’ crying need for another clear, unambiguous example of same. An organization that defines itself in terms of buildings rather than people. An organization that is five to ten years behind the technology curve. Finally, an organization that is too big and too entrenched to change from within.

I joined ALA as a student member, because I believe strongly in professional organizations, and because I wanted to understand and participate in the evolution of my newly-chosen profession. I now believe that my money and my energy will be better-spent elsewhere. I respect that many will choose differently; I respect the change-from-within efforts I read about in the blogsphere.

This is, however, the only choice I can make for myself.

ALA, guilds, and employment

Meredith suggested a while ago that the ALA needs an economics education, given its apparent total inability to see that the current supply of librarians has decidedly outstripped demand, particularly on the entry-level.

I’m not an economist (I’m dismal, but not quite that dismal). I did, however, take a very valuable course from Greg Downey entitled “Information and Labor” last semester, and I’m going to share a bit of one of the articles we read, because it frames the problem well and suggests realistic (if sometimes ugly) solutions.

The article is Chris Benner‘s “‘Computers in the Wild’: Guilds and Next-Generation Unionism in the Information Revolution” (abstract here if you scroll down a bit) and you can find it in Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions, 1750–2000 edited by Aad Blok and Greg Downey and published by Cambridge University Press. Read the article yourself; it’s a good one, and I’m only going to distort it, I’m sure.

Benner points out that a raft of soi-disant web-design and programming “guilds” popped up amidst the employment uncertainty of the dot-com boom. Though they served moderately well to pass on skills, get word out about open jobs, and afford networking opportunities, they were nowhere near as effective as, say, the early unions or the medieval guildhalls. Why? What were the guildhalls doing that the new guilds didn’t or couldn’t?

Medieval guilds kept their fingers in four pies, according to Benner (page 194):

Association control: deciding who gets to work at a particular trade, and how they have to do it, as well as preventing labor oversupply;
Workplace control: owning the tools and the shops, setting prices, and limiting production;
Market control: protecting a monopoly over the product; and
Working with the state: getting charters from local authorities and paying ~~bribes~~ fees to keep them sweet.

I won’t spoil the article by giving you Benner’s thoughts on how modern guilds measure up. (I do want you to read it!) I’m more interested in how ALA measures up.

Note that the first two aims crucially involve limits on labor to avoid drowning the potential market with oversupply either of labor or of product. Benner as well as several other folks we read suggested that this is a key element in retaining power as a worker. Only makes sense, really; if you’re in demand, you hold the trump cards. As more people enter your profession, your value decreases.

So. If you believe this reasoning, a proper guild with its members’ interest at heart absolutely must not drum up a bunch of new apprentices when journeymen are going begging; all that does is depress the labor market and reduce the guild’s power. This is, not coincidentally, exactly the behavior from ALA that folks like Meredith and me are objecting to.

Do I think the ALA needs to start closing library schools and badmouthing the profession? Of course not. I loathe the idea of turning people away from education, even if it would help my individual standing in the job market.

I do, however, think that SLIS curriculum reforms are overdue, even though I tend to disagree with Michael Gorman (who advocates them) on what shape they should take. I’ve enjoyed my tenure in library school, but let’s face it: it’s been frighteningly intellectually timid and contentless as often as not, especially in the courses that supposedly represent the core of the profession. (Have I said so to the Powers That Be? Indeed I have.)

This is about controlling the size and quality of the labor supply. (A commenter at Meredith’s suggested that the MLS isn’t the mark of a quality employee. It should be. It bloody well should be.) Teachers do that. Doctors do it. Lawyers do it. The ALA probably can’t institute similar state-run certification programs at this late date (such things do exist on the state level, but they entirely lack teeth), so it has no choice but to beef up the rigor of its educational institutions. The ALA accredits library schools. The ball is therefore in the ALA’s court.

As I’ve said previously, I also think that the ALA needs to stuff its librarian-shortage rhetoric in the nearest trash receptacle. Fundamentally, it doesn’t help. Unlike a lobby group, a group of laborers is valuable and powerful in inverse proportion to its size. (Relative to the demand for that labor, at any rate.)

Now, ALA might argue that political lobbying is part of its job. I agree, and so I believe would Benner; that fits neatly into his fourth aim. And ALA might argue that it can’t lobby effectively without claiming to represent a large population. I disagree. It isn’t typically numbers that make the difference in today’s lobbying climate; it’s voice, and that ALA has in spades when it decides to employ it. ALA doesn’t need to puff up its membership to have impact. I would additionally argue that dumping truckloads of unprepared newly-minted MLSes on an unforgiving job market is not going to help ALA’s membership numbers one iota. Are the cries of “What does ALA do for me?” not already resounding?

An interesting twist for ALA might be attacking the problem from the other end: defining “library” as “place that employs librarians.” You staff your reference desk with untrained volunteer interns? Sorry, no ALA library accreditation for you. I know, I know; the ALA doesn’t accredit libraries. Well, it could. And such “workplace control” would be a fascinating (and, I think, not entirely unrealistic) way to stem the tide of deprofessionalization.

Those are my recommendations in a nutshell: toughen up library schools, quit herding people in the doors of library schools, keep using voice in places of power to talk up librarianship, and define libraries in terms of librarians rather than materials. (After all, a haphazard pile of books, CDs, and DVDs isn’t a library. Librarians make libraries.)

So if you agree with any or all of these suggestions, what should you do? For a start, if you’re going to ALA Midwinter—I’m not. You can get some dialogue going that I can’t. Feel free to rip off anything I’ve said; I don’t even care about being credited. It’s more important to get some balls rolling, because the ALA has got to step up before the people it purportedly represents are marginalized further.

Heuristics and Wikipedia

You know what annoys me about the whole Wikipedia uproar? I’ll tell you what annoys me about it. (You knew I was going to anyway, right?)

We proto-librarians are informed with much fanfare in library school that librarians have a better sense for “source authority and quality” than the average joe, and that the information sources we choose are therefore better than those the average joe chooses when left alone to choose sources.

One would think that a profession that makes sweeping claims like this would spend a lot more time than it does teaching students how to evaluate sources. Leaving that Achilles heel aside, however…

The methods we are taught to evaluate source authority are not binary yes-or-no algorithms, always spitting out the right answer. They are heuristics. I’ll say that again, louder: H-E-U-R-I-S-T-I-C-S. Print versus online publication, peer-reviewed versus not, reputable publisher versus self- or vanity-publishing, number and quality of post-publication reviews, author reputation—these and their like are all heuristics. (Librarians have developed evaluation heuristics for websites, too, in case you were wondering.)

A quick Google definition hunt will give you a fair idea what a heuristic is, if you don’t already know. My off-the-cuff definition: heuristics are quick-and-dirty but often surprisingly effective surrogates for doing extensive spadework on a problem before making a decision. My favorite book on heuristics and the human brain is an eye-opening research-essay collection by Gerd Gigerenzer, Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart. Find it at a library near you.

The thing about heuristics is that they leak. They fail. They do not weed out everything that needs weeding. They do not include everything that meets acceptable quality guidelines. They can even be gamed, intentionally defeated, by someone who knows what heuristics people bring to the table in a given situation.

That doesn’t mean heuristics are bad; they’re necessary, in fact, because who has all the time in the world? Not to mention that evaluating quality is a fuzzy problem to begin with, not overly amenable to yes-or-no processing. Heuristics are a fine way to attack otherwise intractable problems.

But when we—librarians or ordinary janes—take either the efficacy or the results of our heuristics as gospel (mistaking them for algorithms, I suppose we might call it), we frankly start looking like prize jackasses, and bloody arrogant jackasses to boot. The high-school librarian cited by the anti-Wikipedia journalist (see Many2Many, if you haven’t already) is only the latest example. I could (and do, actually) argue that the famous Sokal hoax demonstrated not so much a failure of human intelligence, but an ordinary and essentially unsurprising failure of human heuristics use. “Well, but it was published in a peer-reviewed publication!” That’s a heuristic too, folks. It fails now and then. Get used to the idea.

Think I’m knocking peer review? I’m not. David’s book got peer-reviewed; I watched the process. It’s a much better book because of the reviewers. But at its base, peer review substitutes somebody else’s reputation and hastily-formed-and-delivered opinion for the wretched and impossible task of going over the author’s work with a microscope. It’s a heuristic. As such, it too fails.

Moreover, heuristics share one key trait with algorithms: unforeseen circumstances can make them outdated. Cling to an outdated heuristic, look even more the jackass. Librarians had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from “All information on the Web is automatically inferior to any information in print!” to “There’s good stuff on the Web, if you know where to look for it and are able and willing to weed out the crud.”

Some librarians haven’t even gotten that far, of course, but they’re jackasses. I’m sorry, they just are.

As for Wikipedia, I included them in my William Morris project for reference class last year. Their article isn’t the best one I found anywhere, but it’s quite competent, and very far indeed from the worst. The worst encyclopedia entry by far, truly craptastical, came from the librarian-drooled-over World Book Encyclopedia.

As I said—heuristics leak.

SLIS’s dilemma and the shell people

“It’s hard to find people to teach these things,” I heard said last week. Things like markup. Things like markup languages. Things like data modeling.

Sure it is. I believe it. That’s because the gut instinct of people who love these things isn’t to teach them—it’s to practice them. That is the root of SLIS’s dilemma.

SLIS can’t offer me a Ph.D program in which I’d get to practice; Ph.D programs are predicated on research, and practice isn’t research. They can’t offer me a job in the professoriate where I’d get to practice. Practice isn’t research, and research is what the professoriate is all about.

Yet SLIS’s master’s program needs to inculcate practice, not just research skills. To do them credit, they even realize it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t bring them one millimeter closer to solving their problem.

What happens when researchers teach practicalities? Well, for one thing, you get people teaching (say) XML or indexing or thesaurus construction who have never in their lives actually tried to do it. At their best, these people do a fair job of teaching the reason for these things’ existence, the problems they try to solve. But they can’t teach people how to do them; they don’t know how themselves!

At their worst? (Here’s the snark I promised the other day.) Shell people, shoring up their ignorance and irrelevance with empty authority. A teacher of indexing software who doesn’t know the difference between an index entry with three first-level subheadings and the same entry with subheadings on three different levels. A teacher of information-seeking behavior who doesn’t grasp how unhelpful it is to spend many hours teaching future practicing librarians about time- and labor-intensive research methods such as diary-keeping and lengthy direct observations.

These people are doing their best. I can’t and don’t fault them for that. But, boy, you bring in one person who knows a few practicalities cold from experience, and students feel the difference deep in their bones. That’s why I got applauded, and I’m far from the only SLIS guest speaker who’s gotten that kind of applause. Sure, I’m a big ol’ ham—I project excitement just because that’s how I am, and people tend to respond to it. But most of it was just that breath of air from the world outside the classroom.

“A lot of the stuff taught here belongs at a community-college level,” one of last week’s sirens told me. Well, yes, I suppose so. I’ve been saying for years that markup ain’t rocket science, much to the consternation of a few people who would prefer that it be. But turnabout is fair play. I can’t do or teach the researchy type things that the professoriate does. I’ve just showed, though, that they can’t do or teach what I do either.

I don’t want to go as far as recommending a community-college model for SLIS. Community colleges have got serious problems of their own, not least among them a habit of treating instructors like veal calves. (How do I know this? I was in a Spanish department, y’all. I knew people who taught Spanish at community college. Not pretty.)

But if SLIS doesn’t manage to find a way to give people like me what we want in return for teaching, they’ll just keep right on with the shell people earning student anomie. I don’t know if they’ve got a way out, frankly, and I’m terribly glad I’m not the one who has to think about it.