An attitude problem July 2, 2009
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Leadership, Libraries, Management, The Profession.20 comments
“All that politicking and making nice with people sounds horrible.”
“I didn’t become a librarian to spend all day working on spreadsheets.”
“Oh, I never want to be management.”
“I could never do your job.”
“I never want a job like yours.”
“Don’t forget where you came from.”
“Are you sure you want that job?”
“Do you even like the work you do?”
We have an attitude problem as a profession. Read those comments I typed above. I’ve heard each and every one of them in the past six weeks. I’ll also grant that I’ve gotten a lot of congratulations — lots of “you rock!” and “I’m so happy for you” and “congratulations, I know you’ve worked hard for this” — but almost all of them were from people who care about me personally or have worked with me on an individual level. The above have almost all come from people in our profession who look at “management” and wrinkle their noses.
So let me offer my answers.
“All that politicking and making nice with people sounds horrible.” Actually, it sounds like what needs to be done in order to make sure that you have the support you need to do your work. Every time I smile and shake hands with an administrator, help out with a problem in another office, or provide information that someone outside the libraries needs, I add a piece of goodwill to the relationship. And someday you’ll need me to leverage that goodwill to ensure that a project inside the library succeeds. So it’s not horrible. It’s necessary. Also, being nice and helpful? Has its own rewards related to being the kind of person I want to be.
“I didn’t become a librarian to spend all day working on spreadsheets.” You know what? I did. I love data. I love information. I love manipulating it and studying it and making it tell me what I need to know. Excel and I are buddies. And if someone didn’t spend all day swimming in Excel, you wouldn’t have good, accurate, and fair information analysis available in your library. Don’t knock it. I like it, and you need me to like it, and the fact that I like it doesn’t make me somehow less of a librarian than you are.
“Oh, I never want to be management.” Well, I do. And I am. And you’re lucky someone is and does, because this ship doesn’t sail itself. Need someone to make a decision when two colleagues can’t agree? That’s management. Need someone to allocate funding fairly? That’s management. Need someone to advocate for the library? Management. Need someone to make hiring decisions? Management. Someone has to do it.
“I could never do your job.” In most cases, yeah, you could, you just don’t want to.
“I never want a job like yours.” Okay, that sounds more true. But do you have to say it in that tone? Because as I mentioned, I wanted this job, so talking about it like it’s made up of vinegar and mold is really, y’know, offensive.
“Don’t forget where you came from.” *headdesk* Do you think my personality is that malleable that I’ll somehow put on the Great Mantle Of (Not Paid As Well As You Think I Am) Leadership and suddenly forget that I was once a librarian? Or that I somehow no longer have a boss, or report to anyone, or care about the impact of my actions on anyone but myself? Who does that? And why do you think I’m one of those people?
“Are you sure you want that job?” …yes? I spent a lot of time and effort on the job application, I worked hard to present myself well in the phone and (two-day) in-person interview, I negotiated my salary, and after all of that, I wouldn’t have signed the contract if I didn’t. Really. I knew what I was getting into, and I thought long and hard about it. I want to succeed, and I wasn’t going to take the job if I didn’t think I could do it — and certainly not if I didn’t want to do it.
“Do you even like the work you do?” Again, and again, and again, YES.
I like knowing that every action in my day is in support of the work of the libraries. I like knowing that my decisions matter. I like knowing that I’m helping people. I like knowing that my time is useful and spent on valuable tasks. I like organizing. I like planning. I like developing strategies and watching them play out. I like making friends and cultivating relationships. I like thinking about complex problems. I like interacting with people with wildly different skill sets and interests.
I get to do all those things as Director of Libraries. So, yes. I like my job. I’m glad I have it.
And I’m truly sorry that so many people have had bad managers, mean bosses, and foolhardy leadership, but really: We have to get over it. We have a bad, bad attitude, as a profession, about management, and we need managers. Your boss will retire — and who will step into that role? You’d better hope it’s not one of the people who’s spent their career belittling managers. And if it’s one of the people who’s been consistently denigrated for wanting to be in a management role, I’ll bet my funky Fluevog heels that you’ll be relieved when you realize they’re a better person than you’ve given them credit for.
Movers and Shakers 2009 March 16, 2009
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Cooperative Coll. Dev., Leadership, Libraries, My Life, The Profession.8 comments
Congratulations are starting to roll in, so I ought to get this written, ASAP, I guess!
I’m extremely proud to have been named one of Library Journal’s 2009 Movers and Shakers (though, as I said recently to some friends, I think being an LSW Shover and Maker might be more fun). I like this particular honor because someone has to nominate you, and knowing that my peers admire and value my work means more to me than having my name up in lights. (Though, really, that’s pretty damn cool, too.)
I worked as a marketing writer when I was in college, and so I have a very clear understanding of the quirkiness of interviewing people for professional writing. Interviews are like mist, hard to grab onto, once they’ve moved from your mouth to the writer’s fingers to the editor’s lens. So in the interests of clarity, I thought I’d take this forum to expand on what I said to Sarah Bayliss, the writer, who was then edited for space constraints by LJ. That process produced a few printed nonsequitors that made me giggle, so here are the fuller responses for anyone who’s interested.
What do you bring to your present work from your previous work experiences? From your background in English literature?
My background in literature — particularly as taught at a rigorous undergraduate institution, and as taught by my professors, who challenged the notion of canonicity — made it easier for me to think critically about our collections and our collecting policies. What’s *necessary* for a collection in literature to support our English majors? What’s just *nice* to have? What are the emerging pedagogical trends in the subject? How will those impact our collection needs? And once you learn to think that way for one field, you can apply those lessons, thought patterns, and analyses to other subjects. Which is what a good collections librarian in an academic library dedicated to serving the curricular needs of its students must do. It’s harder to apply those ideas to a field not your own, but librarians are consummate generalists. We’re teachable. 
Tell me about the evolution of your ideas about coordinated collection development, which seems to be one of your main issues. How, specifically, is this venture working?
It’s working slowly, as might be expected. SUNY is a huge higher education system, but it’s an amazing one, with huge potential in our libraries. The size of the system and uniqueness of the various institutions involved in the project mean that we can’t act with laser focus or with lightning quickness, but we’ve been able to leverage our similarities as four-year institutions into something that we can build on over time. In the first five years I was with SUNY, my director and I talked wistfully about how much we’d love to see someone jump-start SUNY’s efforts toward cooperative collection
development… and then last year, with her support and the backing of the SUNY Council of LIbrary Directors, we made it happen. A dozen committed directors dragged their collections librarians to a meeting, and in a conference room we sat down, stared at each other, and talked through our initial concerns, our big ideas, our hopes, and our reservations. I think we all expected the other librarians to say “It will never work”, and instead we all shared our excitement and realized that we could, we thought, DO THIS. And we made a small plan with goals we thought we could achieve — reduce duplication in new orders — and a specific request for resources from our directors — a group subscription to WorldCat Collection Analysis — and we just moved forward. We just *did it*, without a lot of dithering or meeting or worry. We put together a wiki, a listserv, and three meetings each year, and we’re just doing the work. Making it happen, as we’re each able at our home institution, but sharing the same goal. Some libraries have lagged, some have surged ahead, and others have joined in. And we’re making progress, and we’re all proud of what we’ve done. And of what we’re going to do.
oh yeah, it’s a library “science” November 17, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Growly, Libraries, The Profession, annoyed librarian, library blogs, scholarship.9 comments
Because in the sciences it’s totally okay to blow the concept of peer review out of the water in service of being trendy, right? I roll my eyes. For those not yet following along at home, some links:
The problem:
Journal of Access Services 5:4
The blowback, and only the parts that show up in my FriendFeed as of 3:20pm. I’m certain there’s more:
Apparently Annoyed Anonymous Bloggers can get published in peer-reviewed journals
Being Annoyed with out Being Annoying
Professionally Annoyed
Ridiculous. Frustrating. Stupid. I want it to be some kind of joke that we just missed the punchline on. Barring that, I can’t wait to hear what Haworth has to say for themselves; I hope they have some excuse for their blatant disregard of their own editorial policies other than “don’t people love the AL? Now they’ll love us, too!”
Internet Librarian 2008: Let the games begin! October 19, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in IL2008, The Profession, conferences.add a comment
Tomorrow I will be my best professional self, sharing what I can with other librarians in our Academic Library 2.0 preconference workshop, but today… today I was just a woman in a “I’m my own hero” tshirt traveling across the country to meet up with a bunch of friends and peers to spend several days as a part of a community like no other.
And we started things off on a good note. You could assume the photos are blurry because the shutter speed was too low for the available light, but I’d rather say that it’s because this group of people is so full of energy, so full of life and motion that they never sit still long enough to have a snapshot taken. It’s part of their charm, really.
Now, to bed, so that I can wake up and teach.
Significant events October 15, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Libraries, The Profession, work life.4 comments
We just had our monthly staff meeting, followed by our monthly “Someone must be having a birthday” excuse to sit around and eat cake, drink coffee, and chat with each other.
During the chatting and eating cake portion, the group of coworkers I was sitting with started telling stories about the things they’ve messed up in their years of professional work. We were discussing how with some student workers it’s easier to train them after they’ve made one big mistake; once they understand that their actions have consequences but that they’re reasonable consequences, and that screwing up is bad but not fatal, they’re sometimes easier to work with. They calm down a little, and relax a bit. Once we were on the topic, though… It turns out that in our shared drive we have a folder called “Significant Events”, so designated as the place to record the crazy “OMG I can’t believe I did that…” things that sometimes happen, and the fallout therefrom, so that people have a place to look to get background on some truly odd quirks in our systems and policies.
The prime mover in that folder is the time someone accidentally renewed all the books currently on loan, followed closely by the time someone accidentally renewed all books due on a particular Thursday. Beware the Global functions of your ILS! The laughing discussion of these mistakes led to other people admitting other “oops!” moments, ranging from humorous typing errors on cards in the days of manual data entry, to the ubiquitous “reply rather than forward” email mistake (“Ah! Get it back! I need that back! AH!”), to the advent of the email-auto-fill address function leading to sending things to the “Staff” rather than one person whose name starts with S, to accidentally inviting an entire school of the institution to a meeting using a calendaring program.
The message I’m hoping to convey with that laundry list is not that making mistakes is okay, or that my colleagues are particularly mistake-prone. Neither is true. Mistakes are still problems that have to be rectified, and we were all, under our laughter, fully aware of the consequences, both short and long-term, of all of the above. The message I’m hoping to convey is that everyone makes mistakes. We just don’t talk about them.
I’ll bet that there are other libraries where a staff member has accidentally renewed, checked in, or otherwise modified the circulation or patron record of things that were never intended to be modified. I know there are other people who have sent emails to places they weren’t intended to go. I’m certain that other people and other institutions have sent out mailings with typos, inappropriate content, and other mistakes. I know that other libraries have posted bad information unintentionally. I know that other people have saved a bad copy over good, or deleted the good, or lost the file, or otherwise been forced to start over. And on, and on, etcetera.
We all make mistakes. We just don’t talk about them.
And the thing is, talking about them doesn’t diminish them, or us. It makes us part of a community of people — some online, some eating cake, all trading stories — who live in the real world, who interact with it in real ways, and who sometimes create Significant Events. We can learn from each other. We can learn to put ourselves and our successes and failures into a context that’s meaningful. We can learn tactics for coping with our mistakes. We can learn to be better professionals.
But only if we talk about everything that makes us who we are. Keeping pieces back means we’re limiting ourselves, and our dialogue.
Jenica Rogers
