Free Range Librarian

I think my theme for August is reclaiming space. Moving back to San Francisco reclaimed my city for me; even if we move along later (as may well happen when we eventually sell the house in Florida), I feel I have reattached myself to my hometown in a way that has been restorative and regardless of where we move will be permanent.

This past week in the library we cleaned out the old “processing room” to help it along its way to becoming a multiuse events room, and in the course of it reclaimed the library for this team here and now.

When I say “cleaned,” I mean we filled an entire recycling truck with five decades’ of detritus (including weeded books that our book-buyer had already gone through), created a small mountain for the computer recyclers to pick up, and still have an immense mound of miscellaneous trash by our back door.

Not to mention two boxes of items we thought would be amusing for a display of “found in the library,” though as the day wore on and more of this junk surfaced, I became less charmed and even mildly saddened. There’s a certain dolor associated with piles of pocket cards and book tape that is hard to pin down. The opposite, in some ineffable way, of “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.”

The next day one of our team members lifted all the blinds in the room. It was startling to see the room filled with sunlight. All the angles and corners seemed more definite, as if the room were reclaiming its own self, emerging into a new, proud identity. It will become an event room even if we start with $9 Ikea folding chairs and whatever folding tables we can beg; this room wants to grow past its former lives.

I had really wanted to claim partial ownership over our library’s participation in our university’s fall orientation (August 20-22), but that is the weekend of my father’s remembrances. If you follow me on Facebook, you know that the event had been planned to be held at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, which suddenly closed this week, but thanks to my highly adept sister, will now be held at Delancey Street. We will scatter my father’s ashes on Sunday, and he’ll return to the ocean he loved.

One of the lessons in small universities is that you have to let go and set aside guilt over what cannot be reasonably accomplished. There are four of us, and it’s amazing we do what we do. I had wanted to hold a games night over orientation weekend, lead a journaling/meditation session for those who will not be at Mass, and tout our upcoming activities. But matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and nearly all of the other work that weekend is on one person who needs to live to tell the tale. I am fortunate we can participate in orientation at any level and am grateful for the great team I work with and how much we got done this summer.

We can still hold a games night some other time, and I’m looking forward to the autumn events taking shape: so far, two art talks and a poetry read-aloud. There will be time ahead to reclaim new spaces; there will be another fall orientation to be part of, and a few more after that.

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Innovative Interfaces and its joined-at-the-hip cataloging-company SkyRiver have teamed up to sue OCLC for monopolistic practices. I read the complaint end-to-end today and you can read my somewhat tame, won’t-you-be-my-neighbor assessment on the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

My more passionate, from-the-heart assessment: OCLC is a galumphing behemoth, often clumsily distant from its own kith and kin, with chronic governance issues, a deficit of social acumen, and a palpable mistrust of its membership. But OCLC is our behemoth–yours and mine. If we are going to have a worldwide catalog, it’s going to be a behemoth. Better it be a behemoth that needs to be not-so-gently bumped toward transparency and member participation than a for-profit behemoth in it for itself.

Not only that, but I found myself growing indignant over III’s repeated claim that OCLC users are forced to take part in development of their own products. If there is one solid value I acquired during my time working for a vendor supporting open-source software, it is that participating in the development of the tools I use is a strong positive (and I have yet to feel compelled to participate in product design–if anything, we have to ingratiate ourselves into the process). Co-design is good for me and it is good for the developers and it is good for LibraryLand.  What exactly is III saying–that we are too stupid to participate in the design of the tools we use?

My more pragmatic assessment: when you see a lawsuit over competing technologies, you can be sure some technology is jumping the shark. III (let’s be clear who’s behind this lawsuit–they have some nerve hiding behind SkyRiver’s skirts) needs to stop OCLC, fast, before everyone figures out that because OCLC accidentally created an international cloud-based service forty years ago, OCLC now has an inherent advantage because its technologies are based on web-scale services.

Let me put it another way. If you were designing a library catalog and a resource-sharing service today (or any web-based service, for that matter), what would predominate in your design principles? Would you require users to create discrete local silos duplicating common information that had to be constantly synced and groomed between the two databases, and then ask them to invest far more time in linking these silos through more applications and standards (and, ahem, money)?

That is how the traditional library catalog is designed. I have records in the cloud, and I have records in my local database, and I spend far too much time muddling between the two data sets, and making these data sets coordinate with other data sets, and spending money so that data set A can communicate with data set B. Why do I need local data? The answer is, I don’t, or at least, once OCLC gets its web-based catalog system working, I won’t.

III also fears Navigator, OCLC’s resource-sharing software, and rightly so. Would you design a resource-sharing system as a closed loop (an *expensive* closed loop), so that discovery outside this loop required a fresh search and knowledge of how to conduct it, or would you leverage the ability to make discovery a smooth ripple from the user’s home library through a consortium and on to a global catalog?  That’s a no-brainer. MPOW is a proud pioneer in the SCELC Camino project, which is beginning with a handful of private university libraries but will soon grow beyond that.

I know OCLC doesn’t come cheap, and for a nonprofit, the question of restraint always emerges. The lawsuit makes for lip-smacking reading, with its allegations of high-rolling baksheesh to university librarians (when OCLC visited us two weeks ago, we bought them pizza… clearly I missed the baksheesh memo) and other insinuations of a nonprofit scooping up revenue from poor little librarians and tossing it at its own ongoing bacchanal. I doubt OCLC’s response will be “back atcha,” since III is a for-profit, private company. I’ll let OCLC explain its way out of the allegations, but at least there are standards for nonprofits, and as members, we can ask reasonable questions.

Setting aside the question of III’s own corporate purity, my final question is this. How did SkyRiver set its pricing? It bills itself as a cataloging service, so I wouldn’t expect it to follow OCLC’s example in investing in research and development for 21st-century library technologies that hold out the promise of liberating us from arcane, expensive, time-consuming practices. But still… how is SkyRiver’s pricing based?  Was it designed to be too affordable to resist? For that matter, why did III even get into the cataloging business in the first place? Out of the kindness of its heart?

It’s funny, but after reading the complaint end to end, it had the opposite reaction it intended. I felt defensive of OCLC, and proud of what it has done to date. Like family, OCLC can be infinitely annoying, and yet yield surprising satisfaction. When I engage with OCLC–contributing records, sharing resources, even designing resource-sharing services–I feel part of something bigger than I am, something that can be complex and daunting but also highly rewarding.

I don’t want the services I provide to be reduced to a simple equation of what’s cheapest at the moment. That’s the WalMart mentality. I need to be a good steward of our fiscal resources, but sometimes that requires we spend a little more (like buying iMacs instead of low-end junk) to get what we want (reliable quality service to our users). I certainly would be chary of a for-profit service challenging a not-for-profit service strictly over the issue of price, and I hope you would be as well. I know what WalMart has done to small-town America, and I would hate to see that done to LibraryLand.

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This is a general catch-up post prompted by the number of people I ran into at ALA who asked, “How ARE you?” in that very pregnant manner that means, so, is your life still screwed up?

And no disrespect to people who enriched our lives during the Florida Experiment — I particularly miss my writing friends! — but that was a particularly awry three years for me, personally and professionally. It was a “growth experience,” and I appreciate my new life so much more, but I could have skipped the over-long teachable moment and come out just fine.

On my jobs in Florida, it was a matter of “fit”; I took work that was available, and I tried to contribute back to the places I worked, and I particularly learned a lot working for a vendor. But ultimately these were not the kind of professional opportunities such as I have now that fits me like a tailored suit. I particularly never felt that I contributed back to the places I worked in ways that befitted my potential, and that’s a hard thing for me.

So now I live in San Francisco in a delightful neighborhood near where I grew up and every weekend we go out and do fun things in the best city in the world, I have an annoyingly long commute where I crawl back and forth across the Bay Bridge in Sparkle, my stalwart Honda (no, I can’t really take public transit), and I have a terrific job where I put in too many hours and have far too few resources and work with the most delightful people (in the library and campus-wide, including the students, who in the words of a faculty member have apparently been sprayed with something that makes them extra-nice) who make it all very satisfying.

My commute is tame in the morning because I leave the house at oh-dark-thirty, enabling me to skim across the Bridge where to my right  as I approach Oakland are those strange cranes that have always looked to me like dinosaurs. My commute is icky at night, but every day I am amazed to sit in my car and see myself approaching San Francisco.

Note: everyone asks me about the commute, and I am then often grilled about public transit as if I had not really considered all the options. It is technically possible, but not really feasible, even though the 6 Masonic runs right past the house we rent.

(We rent part of a house, and our tenant below is a delightful person who greatly amused the Census taker by declaring his ethnic status was “Direct descendant of Nordic Gods.” Again, we’re lucky.)

Sandy’s job is good–we really lucked out in this move back to where we should be–and naturally, that helps make life good for us in many ways, not the least of which is having two incomes. They aren’t huge incomes but we aren’t huge spenders. Our biggest splurges are things like having a beer at the Magnolia while we read the Times or taking a walk on Crissy Field and then dining on high-end hot dogs made from sustainable, humanely-raised beef, on Acme bread, no less. We have CostCo and farmer’s markets and Trader Joe’s to keep us in affordable comestibles; at the height of spinach season I bought $3 worth of spinach at the Alemany Market and it was so much spinach I believe we had a greenish cast by the end of that week. Now we are feasting on blueberries, and next up, figs.

I gave myself a writing moratorium so I could wrap my head around my new life, particularly the demands of my new position, which has needed my attention and focus. It still does, but I’m gaining a rhythm (and having just hired a significant addition to the team, I feel myself relaxing a bit; when you are running on 4 cylinders, they all need to be firing to make it up that hill).

A friend who I ran into at ALA commented that she thought I was “leaving the profession” to do the “writing thing,” which is one of those complicated statements people make that cannot support a hallway explanation.  When someone has a child or becomes a church deacon or learns to play the saxophone well enough to join a community orchestra, I do not assume they are “leaving the profession,” and yet to have an avocation such as literary writing confuses some people.

If I won the lottery (to expand on a recent Twitter meme), I wouldn’t quit my library job immediately; I’d make sure we found a good replacement, and then, yes, I would quit my library job and assume the writer’s life full-time. The older I get the more honest I am with myself about that. It doesn’t mean I don’t love my job; but being human, given free money, I’d rather play all day, and writing, though hard work, is my play. But I’m not the kind of writer who is ever going to be able to do this as a living, and that is that.

In any event, I have multiple writing projects in the cooker: moving forward several essays that need to be finished and find homes; writing my father’s death notice (what some people erroneously call an obituary); and writing about writing my father’s death notice, which presents interesting challenges, since he lived a fascinating life made even more fascinating by his many versions of it.

I also keep pecking away at homebrewing (which has its own companion essay in work), though there are many interesting things to do in San Francisco, so I homebrew less. The latest 2 batches are a Rye IPA, the first time to try it out, the second time to see if my success was repeatable. (Not quite, for complex reasons another post will address.)

Like many working writers, I read far less than most non-librarians assume, but every week I do plow my way through the New Yorker and the Sunday New York Times, and I did enjoy Persepolis, our campus-wide first-year-experience book for the upcoming academic year.

I’m assuming we won’t be in San Francisco proper forever; at some point we will sell our lovely house in Tallahassee (it’s rented out now) and if possible, buy a place in the Bay Area, which means way out somewhere on the BART line; or our rental situation will change; or we will decide that it’s time for me to have the easy-peezy commute (and Sandy’s church is right across the street from a major Muni station). (We lucked out–again–by needing an apartment when availability was good and rents were competitive–and prices do come down when you say “We’re a minister and librarian…”) But at the moment, it is so wonderful to be in the middle of this most wonderful city. If I could, I would stay here forever. I will certainly never leave California again. You can write that down in ink.

I suppose one very important Teachable Moment I can grudgingly draw from the Florida Experiment is that I am acutely aware how lucky I am.  As Joan Didion wrote, “Life changes in an instant.” We are in one instant, and I am doing whatever I can to live in that instant as fully as possible, and to slow down that clock and tread very deliberately through this moment. There will be other instants, because this is life. But here we are now.

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