Librariana – Page 2 – Caveat Lector

Training-wheels culture

My students are the connected ones, the technically-minded ones, the ones unafraid of novelty. Some of them flat-out don’t believe me when I try to (more or less gently) pass out clues about the technical atmosphere of librarianship. That’s okay. They’ll find out for themselves, and they’ll remember what I said, and they won’t be as shocked by it as I was.

I read through the freeform comments on Nicole Engard’s survey about what people learned and wish they had learned in library school, and I recommend that you do the same. It’s a curious mix. There’s a raft of comments wanting more (and more practical) technology training. There’s also a raft of comments wanting more and better cataloguing training.

Wait, what? Cataloguing? Not “cataloguing and metadata,” not “information management,” not “bibliographic and other sorts of description.” Cataloguing. From a bunch of librarians who manifestly aren’t cataloguers. What gives?

I’ve been letting that question percolate in the back of my head since I read the survey responses. I’m afraid the answer is probably an it’s-all-more-complicated constellation of mindsets and external forces, but I want to push back against what I see as the easiest and most obvious conclusion that could be drawn from the evidence, which is that MARC cataloguing is the center of the library universe.

(It ain’t the center of my universe. I don’t get anywhere near it myself, and I’m firmly in the Roy Tennant “MARC Must Die!” camp. If that makes me not a librarian, well, okay. I’m sure Peter Murray-Rust would find work for me somehow or other.)

Some while ago I went to a library-internal meeting at which people shared what they’d learned at the last big ALA conference. Someone had gone to one of Roy Tennant’s ILS talks, and had emerged rather shocked by his ideas. After all, she said, structured bibliographic description can’t disappear forever!

Aha. So now we have one locus of confusion. MARC and structured bibliographic description are not equivalent, except (it would appear) to a lot of confused librarians. I’m willing to bet that some of the librarians in Nicole’s study are reacting to what they see as a threat to the larger world of information organization, perceiving MARC as a proxy therefor. This is nonsense, of course, but who’s going to tell them that in such a fashion that they understand it?

I am consistently boggled by people asking me for training on DSpace’s deposit interface. It’s a series of brain-dead web forms, for Pete’s sake. No, they’re not perfectly usable (in fact, there are some pretty brain-dead design choices in there), but they’re just web forms! If you can do your banking online, you can deposit stuff in DSpace. Training?

But I see this all the time; it’s a much larger issue than DSpace. Librarians are a timorous breed, fearful of ignorance and failure. We believe knowledge is power, which taken to an unhealthy extreme can mean that we do not do anything until we think we understand everything. We do not learn by doing, because learning by doing invariably means failure. So a librarian just won’t sit down with AACR2, Connexions, and the AUTOCAT mailing-list archive and work out how to catalogue a novel item. Nor she won’t sit down at the computer and beat software with rocks until it works.

She’ll sit passively, hands in lap, and ask for training, feeling guilty the whole time for displaying ignorance.

So what does this have to do with how often cataloguing came up in Nicole’s results? Well, I don’t think all these librarians are asking for cataloguing training because it’s vitally important to their everyday work. They’re asking because they feel ignorant about something that they have been told (hat-tip to Yee and Gorman) is the center of their profession, and they don’t feel capable of learning on their own. MARC/AACR2 is bloody complicated, after all—and the more complex something is, the more librarians shy away from learning by picking apart one piece at a time.

Fundamentally, cataloguing training is not going to help these people. It won’t help them feel confident about MARC and AACR2, because I don’t know anybody who does (and I do know some cataloguers, thanks). It won’t help them feel more confident about the future of the profession, because like the librarian at the ALA-wrapup meeting, they won’t understand that the external forces that are forcing MARC out of the picture don’t really threaten them. (“I don’t see how programmers can do any better [than MARC]!” blustered one of Nicole’s respondents. That’s not arguing from a position of considered strength. That’s flat-out ignorance, is what that is. Go sit in the corner until you’ve done some reading up on data mining.) And it won’t help them do their jobs any better.

What they need is to kick off the training wheels, honestly. Their locus of control vis-a-vis technology needs to move a long way inward. There is nothing more frustrating than dealing with fear-based apathy. I don’t mind intelligent skepticism; I’ll prove a given tool’s worth or I’ll abandon it. I don’t mind dealing with genuine problems. They happen.

I do mind, quite a lot, having to stand over a grown professional’s shoulder teaching her to use a set of essentially self-explanatory web forms because she cannot be bothered to learn by doing. And I do this a lot. Once I’m done with the repository redesign, I’m going to come up with a screencast on the subject so that I don’t have to do it so often.

I think training-wheels culture may be the source of a lot of the friction between so-called “twopointopians” and their opposite numbers. When “look, just give it a try, okay?” falls on wilfully deaf ears, strident advocacy is a natural, expected response. I myself roll my eyes at some of the more “moderate” responses to Library 2.0 and new OPAC developments and whatnot because I know perfectly well that training-wheels culture uses “moderate” responses as figleaf excuses not to change, not to learn, and not to try.

One of the things I’m trying to do with my class is encourage them to lose their training wheels. Some of them don’t have any—but a few do, and I’m hoping I can do my little bit to encourage the decline and fall of training-wheels culture.

Demeanor and community

DSpace’s market position in the IR software industry is “the out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solution.” It doesn’t demand the up-front coding investment that Fedora does, nor is it as narrow-focused as regards ingested material as EPrints. Since DSpace is open-source software, it attracts those who cannot afford hosted IR solutions; such adopters, owing to poverty, are not likely to be overblessed with technical staff.

This has consequences for the composition of the DSpace user community. I’d bet my entire net worth and a bit over that DSpace adopters contain many, many more non-techies and accidental techies than Fedora adopters. (I consider myself among the “accidental techies” group, incidentally. I’m not trained for DSpace sysadminning or code-monkeying and I’m far from expert at either, but I do them anyway.) I suspect, in fact, that these are the great silent majority of the DSpace community—emphasis on the “silent.”

I have some fairly direct evidence to bolster this notion. I got a considerable number of back-pats at OR ’07 over the DSpace customization guide that Tim Donohue and I wrote for JCDL ’06. A considerable number. Toss in that Tim must have gotten a lot too, that the self-selected OR ’07 crowd is in all probability more technical than the general run of DSpace administrators, and that the guide we wrote is actually pretty basic, and… look, you tell me how technical the DSpace adopter pool is.

Over at Five Weeks, we have several participants who worry over their perceived lack of technical savvy. We’re doing our best to reassure them, in part because honestly, too many librarians feeling uneasy and defensive about this look for any reason to back away from the keyboard. Confirming their perceptions about their own skills only leaves them less likely to learn, while superciliously casting aspersions on their abilities sends them fleeing headlong away. Reassure them, and be rewarded with wider adoption than you’d have thought possible—Five Weeks’s forty participants are blogging and wiki-ing great guns over there, and the course hasn’t even started yet!

Do I think this lesson extends to the DSpace community? I surely do. Do I think the core of the DSpace community—coders, mailing-list participants, documenters, et cetera—is generally friendly to the community’s less-technical members? I surely do not.

When I started at MPOW, I did as many newbie DSpace administrators do: I ran into roadblocks, problems the FAQs and mailing-list archives didn’t solve. (Heck, I still run into roadblocks. Ask me why the repository I run doesn’t have RSS feeds running. I can’t answer you, because I have tried everything I can think of and I don’t know why they still refuse to work, but feel free to ask.) More often than not, asking the dspace-tech mailing list produced no reply. Not “no helpful replies,” not “no useful replies,” but no replies whatsoever.

Frankly, I didn’t think much of the DSpace community after that, not for quite a while. Things have changed for the better in the year and a half I’ve been doing this, but I still see problems going unanswered (not just unresolved, unanswered), and I wonder how many current newbies have the same bad taste in their mouths that I had back in the day.

I also see a disturbing tendency toward non-techie-bashing by DSpace techies. I offer examples not to shine a spotlight on individual people, because I admit I’ve had my share of eye-rolling “what a maroon!” moments on reading the mailing lists, but only to establish that this is a genuine phenomenon. For that reason, I’m not attributing examples in this post; the links will have to do.

This weblog post regarding the University of Calgary’s search for an ETD solution, for example, contains the bald order “DSpace is an Open Source product, where words like ‘cannot’ should not be used unless you really have looked into it. The underlying search engine can do all of the things required for Calgary, and all it requires is the alteration of the UI to support it”.

Hey, where did “out of the box solution” go? Like it or not, ETDs are a major IR use case. If DSpace doesn’t support them out of the box, that is not the problem of DSpace administrators, it is DSpace’s problem. Getting huffy at managers who may not be able or even allowed to mess around under the hood solves nothing. It certainly doesn’t fix DSpace to work right with ETDs.

(Think “allowed” is not a real problem? Think again. I won’t be DSpace-sysadmin-in-chief at MnewPOW, which suits me fine because Tomcat gives me ulcers. At the interview, though, I received several strong hints that my coding chops, such as they are, would not only not be required, but would be actively discouraged by the actual sysadmins. Fortunately, this seems not to be entirely the case, but you’d better believe I will be walking on eggshells at MnewPOW until I sort out what I can and can’t do.)

Now consider this reply to a list of feature requests. The content of the reply is great, thought-provoking stuff. The manner of expression of the reply is unnecessarily scornful, completely failing to address the actual content of the original post in its zeal to scold the poster. Also consider that as of this writing, that reply has been the only reply.

Look, it takes considerable courage for a non-programmer to post feature requests to the mailing list or Bugzilla page for an open-source software project. I’ve been around the block some; I know how OSS programmers generally react to that. Most DSpace admins, techie or not, probably have the same awareness, so if someone speaks up, trust me, it’s about something important. Dumping on someone for politely opening a conversation about features is a sure road to never hearing from him or her again—and never hearing at all from dozens of DSpace adopters just like that one. That in turn is a recipe for DSpace to set poor development priorities.

So consider this my public call to the core of the DSpace community to watch its communication style and demeanor. We weaken the DSpace project when we turn people off. We weaken the DSpace project when we fail to offer help. Given its market position, we weaken the DSpace project when we make unwarranted assumptions about DSpace admins’ technical capacity. Let’s not, okay?

Even here

I’m fat, graying, scarred, unfashionable, generally homely as the proverbial mud fence. It bothers me less and less these days, and today I was reminded why.

At break, I met another DSpace admin, who will remain anonymous in this post for reasons that will shortly become obvious. Unlike me, she is young and conventionally quite attractive. She introduced herself to me, and we talked DSpace geekery for a bit before she said in a low voice, “I was glad to see another woman in the room. There was this guy from [locale deleted] behind me who was going on and on about taking me out, and you helped me escape him.”

In other words, some creepwad came on to her. At a PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCE.

For future reference, I am always available as a haven for folks in like case. I give off plenty enough ugly vibes (never mind “tall and hefty and imposing-looking” vibes) to make these wankers piss off.

I don’t know who the perp was. I don’t want to know (though if I find out, he should worry). Right now I just want to tell him, loudly and publicly, that he needs to cut that crap out NOW. No woman should have to “escape” people in a professional setting. EVER.

And yet it happens. Not to me, because I’m old and fat and ugly and married. But it happens. And it shouldn’t. And when the hell is it going to damned well stop?

Sexism and group formation

I got Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment out of the library again, because it’s a book I like with a message I needed just about now. I don’t know how many women in male fields (and no, that’s not a spoiler; it’s clacksed from the very first page, and the title is a dead giveaway too) Pratchett talked to before writing this one. Perhaps no one out of his ordinary acquaintance; the man has a gift for hitting bullseyes about human interaction.

A (minorly spoilery) passage that hit me this read-through:

He looked innocent, so possibly he didn’t understand the raging argument that had just broken out in Polly’s head. A credit to the women of your country. We’re proud of you. Somehow those words locked you away, put you in your place, patted you on the head and dismissed you with a sweetie. On the other hand, you had to start somewhere…

Part of the annoyance of being feminist is having these arguments with myself all the damn time. It’s such an energy drain. Do I call this one out? Did that person mean what was just said, or was it just a brain-fart? If I dig in my heels and howl, am I going to create more heat than light? Will anybody back me up? Why, for heaven’s sake, did that make me so angry? I’m a grownup, and it’s not like I haven’t heard worse before. Why can’t I just let stuff go? How much trouble am I willing to get into over this? Honestly, how much?

Meredith used the word “subtle” to characterize sexism in systems librarianship. I’m going to use the word “insidious” instead, and try to explain why. “Subtle” carries the connotation “intentional” to me, and I don’t believe that’s warranted. I don’t know a single librarian of either gender capable of even thinking anything like that absurd Forbes article (which from me gets no linklove, nuh-uh, no way).

And when I cut loose on CavLec finally, I didn’t get a pile-on in return the way Bess did. Well, I sort of did, actually; I spent a solid month and more answering email with my teeth lacerating my tongue to shreds. But the pile-on wasn’t an outpouring of blatant insult. It was an outpouring of “hey, um, WTF just happened?”

Insidious. The word implies invisible destruction of trust, which to me is just right. I started out, as I think many women of my age started out, honestly trusting that the worst of the struggle for gender equality was over, and that I could and should expect to be treated with courtesy and respect wherever I went. Not because I was a woman, not in spite of being a woman—but just because. Because it had finally been acknowledged that women are, you know, people and stuff.

When you think about it, against the tapestry of history? That’s an amazing trust. The wonder isn’t that it gets broken in some women. The wonder is it’s left intact as often as it is—and not just out of blindness, wilful or otherwise.

The reduction of women’s contributions to sniffed-at footnotes that annoys Pratchett’s Polly is only one insidious way to damage women’s trust in basic fairness. The one I most recently ran into boils down to honorary guyness (and I use the word “guy” rather than “man” intentionally). A woman can be an honorary guy, sure, with all the perquisites and privileges pertaining to that status—as long as she never lets anything disturb the guy façade.

It’s good to be an honorary guy, don’t get me wrong. Guys are fun to be around. Guys know stuff. Guys help out other guys. Guys trust other guys. And in my experience, they don’t treat honorary guys any differently from how they treat regular guys. It’s really great to be an honorary guy.

The only problem is that part of the way that guys distinguish themselves from not-guys is by contrasting themselves with women. Women are the not-guys. It’s an incredibly insidious set-up. When a guy cracks a pr0n joke, he honestly doesn’t have anything against women; he’s just affirming his guyness. Other guys take it so, and don’t think twice about it. It never occurs to the guys that these boundaries are artificial, that there’s nothing intrinsic to women that makes them not-guys, that there are better ways (e.g. group purpose, mutual support) to define a group and the desired characteristics of group members. And since that never occurs to them, pr0n jokes and the like get baked deep into group culture.

Honorary guys, now—some can see the guyness-affirmation for what it is to the guys and let it go. I know some honorary guys who do precisely that. Maybe their trust in fairness remains intact (after all, as honorary guys they’re being treated well); maybe it doesn’t. Maybe some of them come around to the guy point of view, despising women who haven’t become honorary guys. I’ve never quite dared ask.

I’m not that kind of honorary guy, I’m afraid. I’ve paid for it, and I expect I shall again. But at least y’all get to watch me talk through it all.

Mark, then, what happens to temporarily honorary guys who have trouble accepting the typical guy style of group-membership claim. Every guyness-affirmation from every guy erodes their trust, in that specific guy, in the group, in men, in fairness. My $DEITY, do they think about me like that? Heavens, that was disgusting and uncalled-for—do they know how they sound? If they know, do they care? How do these people treat their mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, female bosses, female co-workers? Do they laugh at them behind their backs? Do they laugh at me behind mine? If so, what am I doing here? Do I really belong, or am I just the mascot, just the dartboard, just the token?

Insidious. Let me tell you, insidious. Not least because the guys have no intention of causing these reactions, and no idea they’re doing it. I haven’t even touched the question of fear for one’s bodily and professional integrity, but in the worst cases, it’s real. If I’m in a hotel bar with these guys at a conference, am I even safe? If these guys have power, am I toast if I tick them off? Even though most guys would be outright horrified that any woman, especially an honorary guy they honestly like, would distrust them so.

Now mark what happens when a guy, honorary or not, assails the definition of not-guys as women by asking for the pr0n jokes to stop, please, and now would be nice. Every guy in the place has suddenly had his guyness, his group membership, even the very existence of and justification for the group, called into question. Of course the result is unconsidered defensiveness. How could it be anything else?

And that defensiveness is a serious, sometimes fatal, blow to the honorary guy’s trust in the victory over sexism. Not only will guys crack pr0n jokes, they’ll defend the practice, bemoan losing it as a diminution of group culture; I’ve seen ’em do it. Even though (here’s the insidious bit) it’s not really pr0n jokes they’re defending; it’s group cohesion. And when honorary guys have no more trust left? Well, I’m Exhibit A. Come to your own conclusions.

The story doesn’t end there. Groups blow up, feelings are hurt all ’round, everybody yells and screams, friendships are broken, people are blacklisted, nobody understands WTF just happened, the guys suddenly wonder if they trust honorary guys and if they should, and it all sucks amazingly. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, bled (metaphorically) all over it, wish like you wouldn’t believe that things had been different.

Meredith’s comments have a deeply troubling variation on the honorary-guy scenario; it isn’t only “guys” who use this group-cohesion method, and it isn’t only women who are shoved into the not-us group. I saw this same scenario brought up on a different library blog (I forget which, or I’d look it up); the female techie librarian targeted had the courage to dispute the homophobia with “And if I am [lesbian]?” Good for her. I hope her co-workers felt all due shame.

In addition to the homophobia, though, I want to call out the anti-techism in that anecdote, even though as an outrage it pales in comparison. How many librarians are defining librarianship as intrinsically analog? (Shortly after I was hired, I heard a librarian at MPOW angrily insisting that MPOW needed to hire “real librarians.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by the term, but I got the message loud and clear that she didn’t mean me. Was scary at the time, I admit.) How do we change that group definition without threatening those librarians’ self-concept?

I’m not saying anything here that a passel of sociologists haven’t said better than I ever could. That’s the funny thing about all this. It’s not hard to read about these things. There’s lots out there that would help us break these counterproductive patterns of group formation within our profession and in the larger world. We’re librarians. Why do we not read, why do we not research, when patterns like these damage us?

I have suggestions for worthwhile reading, but this post is too long already. You could do worse, though, than start with Monstrous Regiment.

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.

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.