Not too long ago I saw a sign in a store that asked (or at least I recall it asking), “Do you know what to do if a tornado is coming your way?”
My gut response was “Scream and faint.” Then, while pushing the cart around the store (randomly, so that I had to criss-cross the meat aisle several times, where I saw steaks that cost more than new bras), I thought to myself, so what would I do if a tornado was beelining toward me?
I was raised in earthquake country, where the disaster paradigm embraces serendipity and inevitability. In California, it’s all rehearse, rehearse, rehearse: strap down that bookcase, take note of the windows bound to implode, put the water and granola bars in the trunk (so if you’re wedged in between two spans of the Bay Bridge for several days, you can at least nosh away your worries). When it happens, oh mama, it happens: the earth crumbles beneath you; the seven-foot bookcase lands on your head; the bridge collapses.
So it’s strange to live in an area where you have at least a wedge of opportunity to improvise. Hurricanes are long, slow events, beginning with watching CNN for several days and racing around town to replenish your disaster vittles and then, worst case, following highways out of down marked with green symbols that I first thought had something to do with environmentalism and turned out to mean “this way to get out of Dodge.” (Unless you are like Joshua Clark of “Heart like Water” and you decide to hang around during the storm, which turns out to be a bad idea, though he did get a book out of it.)
So based on hurricanes — a sort of wind/air disaster — I concluded that if a tornado were coming my way I should run outside and — what, exactly? Dash into the woods? Get into my car and try to out-drive it?
It turns out that what I should do is either climb into our sturdy under-house crawl-space (if at home) or nip into the nearest restroom (if at work). Initially the work instructions said “appropriate restroom,” but it turned out “appropriate” did not really mean “based on the gender you most closely associate with at the moment when tornado is announced” (or even “restroom closest to your assigned office,” this being a rather flexible workplace on that point as well) but “restroom you can get to fastest when the guys with two-way radios are running and shouting.” So the instructions were forthwith clarified, and I was edified.
What this all means is that I both agree and disagree with Dorothea, who over on Caveat Lector in her “Training Wheels Culture” post grumbled quite credibly about professionals who pull out their real or metaphorical union cards and insist on “training” to learn anything; professionals who will not tinker and explore and learn on their own.
I know who she’s talking about. I knew who she was talking about back in 1992, before she was even a Liberrian, when I was training librarians on the Internet and not only did many of them not explore on their own but there were classes where I literally (if gently) placed librarians’ hands on keyboards and made them type. (I suppose now I’d be charged with harassment.)
It’s frustrating, exasperating, and depressing, even more so because Dorothea isn’t talking about librarians learning how to launch a space shuttle, program in assembler language, or cure HIV; we’re talking piddly stuff, for the most part.
But I did hear a gentle “ding” when she wrote, “I am consistently boggled by people asking me for training on DSpace’s deposit interface.”
I can think of quite a few interfaces that are massively non-intuitive. Moodle is muddled; Webjunction is disjunctured; I’ve seen “digital library” products that made me yearn for the good old days, when we rolled up papyrus and stuffed it in pigeonholes. Don’t get me started about OPACs.
Also, as with my inability to divine basic tornado common-sense, sometimes people are earnestly well-intentioned but differently-abled. Dorothea: you can help, or you can turn the page. (No, you can’t pull the Darwin card. After all, I was smart enough to attend the meeting that explained what to do in a tornado.)
I’ve also had training that caused a great bubble of light to appear over my head, wafting me out of the sublunary world of chaos and into the sweet order of knowledge. Or in any event, I had a MySQL class a couple years ago that kicked butt, and several more technical classes (including Siderean‘s excellent product training) that had me shouting, “I SEE the LIGHT!” and oh by the way, quite a few graduate level classes over the years that were “training” for various brain-muscles, and some Microsoft certification that proved extremely helpful, once upon a server.
It’s possible that the people asking Dorothea for training are Artful Dodgers, using “I need training” as the excuse for not learning and exploring. But it could also mean other things — such as (and I don’t know this) that DSpace is to digital libraries as Moodle is to courseware. And it also doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for good training, however that’s defined: hands-on instruction, online classes, conference programs, and the like. In fact, when I started as a librarian, it shocked me how few resources we dedicated to keeping skills current, so much so that the second article every published under my byline was a Library Journal article, “Train for the Top Gun.”
Still, I Know What She Means. I genuflect again in the direction of MPOW, which is remarkably free of such refuseniks. Dorothea’s post explains why I just can’t work in a library again. Life is too freakin’ short.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Google: too big to fact-check? - 2009
- Just catching up - 2004
On the flipside of staff that insist on “training” (my favourite is “training on the new bibliographic database”, because, you know they’re all so different), is the staff that insist on help pages and tutorials. Even better: help pages and tutorials that one must click through to get to the the actual service. Most recently: the new ejournals list (but don’t get me started on users that think that alphabetic lists of several thousand items are useful).
On the alphabetical list: Oh yeah, where you’ve got New York Times under “N” and Historical New York Times under “H.” What could be more useful than that?
I’ve repeated this so often I’m hoarse, but in 2005/6 we did usability testing at MFPOW -1, and out of seven personae, only the soccer mom even bothered peeking at help pages. Nobody reads help pages, except geeks looking for super-tips (and it’s fine to offer them help pages but let’s not kid ourselves who’s being “helped”). My theory is that help pages shouldn’t even be offered during the iterative design page so that we’re forced to design around the interface, not fall back on the help pages.
HALLELUJAH!
“professionals who pull out their real or metaphorical union cards and insist on “training†to learn anything; professionals who will not tinker and explore and learn on their own.”
We don’t want to be thought of as “messing around” when we’re actually *learning*! If supervisors are not looking out for “messing around” we’ve trained ourselves to expect it, to fear it, and be unable to defend it.
Was it Joyce Sariks who said “reading is your job?” Maybe we need to add a corollary. Or another sentence. Something like “experimenting with new ways of doing things is your job” or “learning to use new technology on your own is your job” or I dunno…
Love this post!
Being in an academic library, I don’t see too much of this among our staff (thankfully), although I do wish they were a little more open to trying new developments in technology. When I was in library school, however, I worked in administration at our public library and sat in on a lot of professional staff meetings, taking notes and such for the director. I do recall hearing “Will there be training” for every freaking new software application, every database, etc. It kind of drove me bonkers, frankly.
The other thing that drives me crazy currently are questions about my own job–“What kind of training/classes/experience/coursework do you need?” (this is for the title Electronic Resources Librarian). I tell them, no training, at least not for what I do–you do your own for the most part and if you’re not willing to get out there an play and take the initiative to educate yourself, don’t pursue a career in electronic resources. And really, that can apply to any librarian specialization.
We were just offered training in business writing, and I snapped it up. What a great opportunity to learn more about technical writing! So… maybe if you approach the question less literally? Say, sure, you need a class in storytelling, or surveys, or usability.
Oops! I see what you mean. My rant came across a little harsh, didn’t it? I actually do answer similarly to what you suggest–“I didn’t have coursework specific to the job, but I did take additional library tech courses, some advanced database courses, etc. which might have made me a little more marketable than someone else. ” Something like that. Thanks for setting me straight Karen! There’s always some class out there after graduation that can benefit your work, too.
But the general point that librarians shouldn’t use “I need training” to stonewall the adoption of new technologies is a good one. 🙂