Sutro Tower and Moon

That’s what I’m doing right now, ensconced in my  window seat in coach on my flight home, playing Aretha Franklin’s “Young, Gifted, and Black” tuned up loud enough to drown out the food-smackers behind me while I tidy up trip reports and budget forecasts and put the buff on a small preservation planning grant.

But it was also what I did at ALA…

… When I picked up my badge and began my peregrinations through meetings and exhibits

… When I met up with old and new colleagues over dinner, coffee, lunch, walks down the street, hugs in the hallways

… When I walked into the Council chambers at ALA Midwinter to hustle up a few signatures for my petition to run as an at-large Council candidate.

I felt it was time to get back into ALA governance. I had been puzzling over whether this was, in fact, the right thing for me to do (in addition to LITA Nominations and GLBTRT External Relations and the occasional panel, such as the “ROI in Academic Libraries” Springer hosted last Friday) until I walked into the Council Chambers.

When I push open our door tonight, I know what to expect: Sandy, our cat Emma, my favorite spot on the green couch, a pile of unopened mail, the Sutro Tower twinkling on the hill. I am not being arch when I say I had a similar (if not quite as numinous) experience in the Council chambers today, when I tweeted that I had a petition and within minutes it was overflowing from signatures from Councilors both fresh and well-aged.

I sat a spell, watching the text transcripts unfold on the wall, watching Councilors debate and stand up and stretch and fill out ballots and knit and scoot onto the Web. (A colleague asked me how anyone could “stand” to be in Council for all those hours, and I replied, “These days, the Internet.” By gum, when I was in my first term we sat there in our analog misery, front and center!)

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since my third term on Council. Financial downturn for my job (Librarians’ Internet Index). The move to Florida. The Florida Era. The move back to California. I’m still me, six years later, but I have that slightly smudged patina of accumulated experience.

We don’t get an Undo button in life, however useful that would be. We’re blessed and cursed with our history. One truth I have had to learn is that for some of us — many of us? — our sense of place looms large in that history.

For many years I preached — and lived — the mantra of “geographic flexibility.” Education, jobs, other opportunities: first I, then we, could follow the wind. I have repeatedly counseled librarians that they had to have geographic flexibility for their careers. I judged them for not seeking jobs far and wide. I looked to myself as an example–I, who had lived worldwide.

Yet it took the Florida Experience to teach me why some people — and I now realize I am in their numbers — have an allegiance to the place they call home so powerful that it is on the other issues in life that they compromise.It’s not that Florida was insanely horrible; it’s that experiences that were less than stellar (and life always has them) took place in a context of alien other-ness — and it was this alien experience that made them sad, at times overwhelmingly so.

There’s an expression, generally condescending: “She knows her place.” It’s too bad it’s never intended as a compliment. I do indeed know my place. I know where I am not “other.” I know where I belong. Not necessarily on this particular block in the Inner Sunset of San Francisco, but not much farther.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking about the events at Harvard last week, where the administration presented tough news about reorganization and downsizing. I can’t speak to what — or who — is right or wrong (if anyone or anything is right or wrong). But I can empathize with the sense that one’s place has become liquid under one’s feet, like one of those rolling earthquakes that feel as if they are never going to stop. Even if you know the Big One is going to hit, that’s an intellectual abstraction until the floor has become molten and undulating and the bookcases are swaying to and fro and it occurs to you that your world as you know it is going to end.

I had a very bad moment about six months into the Florida Experiment where I sobbed, “I want my old life back.” Yes, I did. I forgive myself for that highly emotional moment because I had hit upon a fundamental truth about being and place. There was no magic wand, of course, but I made one change, which led to another, and eventually we got very, very, very lucky.

Naturally, I do not have my old life back. That will never happen. We move forward in time, no lux capacitor to reorder that reality, and only through rigorous memory work — personal reflection, and efforts such as writing, film, music, and dance — can we run our fingers over the fluttering fabric of the past.

But I am no longer a displaced person, living in the backward glance. This may not be forever — it’s not mine to predict cataclysmic change or natural disaster — but it is at least how I plan to spend my days, God willing and the creek don’t rise. And for those who thought the same and have learned otherwise, you have my love and sympathy.

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I will be one of the keynoters at the 2012 annual conference of the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (LIANZA). The conference is to be held in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

New Zealand

I am thrilled not only to be speaking at this conference and traveling to a country I’ve never seen, but also to use my best librarian skills to embrace the theme of the conference, which is: Ipukarea: Celebrate, Sustain, Transform.

(I borrowed and reworded the following language from the keynote invitation.)

Ipukarea (from the Māori language – Te Reo Māori) refers to the ancestral homeland, a significant water or land feature which relates to identity and source of livelihood. It is a place that represents New Zealand history and emotional attachment, a place to go to be rejuvenated, a place that represents the hopes and aspirations of the people and the life-giving waters from which they drink.

Within this broad theme there are the following strands:

Manawa: the heart of the community; library as place, physical and virtual

Returning home: holding to core values and principles in a time of change

Telling our stories: celebrating the great things happening in the libraries of New Zealand Aotearoa

Renewing the heart: experiences that refresh, revitalize and refocus

Transformation: embracing and shaping change, moving forward

These are all great themes for a library conference in 2012, and they also represent the strands of my best keynote presentations from the last fifteen years–as well as the renewal I am part of where I work now.

I adore how these themes are both forward-leaning and reflective, and fully positive. The tenor of these themes reminds me of the discussion about Appreciative Enquiry led by Maureen Sullivan at last summer’s LIAL. I am also reminded of the great team I work with–their ability to provide full-on librarianship  unblinkered, unbowed, relentlessly positive, full of good humor–an A-Team all around.

(Sidebar: It would really be all right if I never attended another keynote address where librarians were chided and mocked for their seemingly backward ways.)

I know almost nothing about New Zealand, which is rather convenient, as it means I have no misconceptions. (I do know three things: it is near Australia; there are over 40 varieties of kiwi fruit–not all indigenous to New Zealand; and some of the best hops come from the land of Ipukarea. I hope for on-ground research on the latter two topics.) So January will be devoted to building a bibliography of key readings on the history, geography, and current issues related to New Zealand. Suggestions greatly appreciated. I’m still mulling over the organizational tools I’ll use to manage my research.

One of my other goals for 2012 was to post more frequently. At first I thought “I’ll blog every day!” But then I had a reality check with myself… right, that’s not happening. However, I can establish a weekly deadline for posting where I am with my Ipukarea journey… and, consider that deadline established.

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Once you have interviewed for a library position, you have established a relationship with that institution and its interview team that stays on your permanent record–yes, the one you were warned about in the first grade. Your paths may never cross again — at least that you are aware of — but you’ve now had an intimate encounter with a number of people who spent an awful lot of time asking themselves if you were the right person for that position.

Perhaps you walked out of the interview and thanked Baby Jeebus you had the common sense not to work for those nut jobs. Perhaps you downed a quart of Rocky Road in a convenience-store parking lot on the way home, just so you’d stop crying, because you knew you blew it.

(Note: herein I break the narrative to state that I have never once believed I nailed the job interview–not ever.)

Perhaps you just had a big ol’ bucket of meh when you walked out of there — nice people, but not a fit for you or for them. Or maybe you immediately had another interview for the AMAZING LIFE-CHANGING JOB, and the other position pales in comparison.

Regardless, do the following:

* Write a thank-you letter, immediately. You can do it by email or you can do it by hand, but write that note and thank the head of the interview team (at minimum) for the opportunity to interview. Yes, even if you think they are all devil-worshippers, or even if you are completely dazzled by that AMAZING LIFE-CHANGING JOB. Write it. Now.

* Exercise patience. Everyone who interviewed you now has to recoup that time to catch up on whatever they didn’t get done during the interview process.

* File away your interview errata where you can tap it later. Like, possibly, decades later. Because they have it on file, too.

* Follow the guidelines for inquiring about the status of the position. You do not have to sit on your hands, but if they say email but don’t phone, then DON’T PHONE.

* Understand that in today’s litigious environment, the interviewer may not want to help you understand where your interview could have been better (I do get asked this question).

* Look for signs of an open door. If the head of the interview committee invites you to apply for future positions, take that at face value. You would be surprised how often interview teams see a quality candidate who isn’t a fit for a particular job and hope they can invite them back someday.

* Sometimes interview teams behave badly. Sometimes paperwork is lost or misdirected. Sometimes major life events interrupt the process. Regardless, under no circumstances should you write the interview team to berate them for not following up. (Yes, I have witnessed this.) If before you were forgotten, now you have made yourself completely unforgettable, and not in a nice way.  If a polite inquiry or two doesn’t do the trick, thank your lucky stars you aren’t working there, and press on.

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I have this theory that an uncomfortably high percentage of research library directors are fundamentally very anxious about their standing among their peers (university as well as library), sometimes to the point of professional myopia, and that this results in occasionally bizarre behavior — in this case,  using budget season in a year of severe cuts all around to prattle on about how the very best libraries don’t need librarians or library instruction (just like my favorite local restaurant can stop serving food or waiting on tables).

Me, I really don’t give a gnat’s behind about my standing among other directors as long as I can get ‘er done. As explained previously, I choose the small teaching-university environment because that’s how I roll.

But I do take notice when a university “librarian” seems quite proud to announce that the (self-inflicted) trend in his library is to significantly reduce the number of professional librarians (replacing some with “PhDs” and IT people) and move out of the information literacy role.

I put “librarian” in quotes quite intentionally. After listening to his speech at Penn [edit: Penn State] and the responses from people I respect, I have concluded that Jeff is posing a question, who is a librarian? My response is that I am a librarian, and he is not.

Let me explain.

A few months after I arrived at MPOW, someone on campus commented on all the “cutting-edge services” I was providing. I pressed this person for examples, just to see what was considered “cutting-edge” in our environment.

My Judy-Jetson improvements included:

* Establishing walk-up (and chat/email) reference services (which we call Research Help, since that’s what it is).*

* A regular docket of literary and arts events in the library

* “Allowing” food in the library (which was true before I arrived, but not well-known)

* Making the library cleaner and brighter, with more seating for students

* A renewed rigor/emphasis on information literacy instruction and implementing assessment thereof

* Implementing online interlibrary loan (hello, 1977!)

By the standards of the Gospel According to Jeff Trzeciak, I must seem like some misguided brontosaurus snuffling in the antedeluvian biblioforest. I should be eliminating walk-up service and replacing practitioners with PhDs who will focus on hifalutin digital projects. I’m… boring. And small. Hardly the stuff of Taiga Forum.

Though–wait–wasn’t one of Taiga’s latest findings, “Within five years, universities will expect libraries to assess their impact on student learning and retention and will fund accordingly”? But I digress.

I made those changes, and prioritized them, based on two things: my twenty years of professional library experience (and more years beyond that); and my environmental scan that concluded the following:

• Our students — many first-generation  college  — arrived with poor research skills, and often graduated that way;
• Instructors understand the need for high-quality information literacy instruction and absorb skills themselves through our library-faculty instructional partnership;
• We, the library, could play a pivotal role in helping our students become lifelong information consumers; and
• We could share and reinforce the joys of reading and cultural literacy, often within the context of faculty- and student-driven creation.

I will stand by those priorities. Yes, we have many other things in work, some highly technical (have your hugged your NCIP messaging today?), some more entrepreneurial, such as our academic-tech support for faculty, and some edgy in a small, fun way, like our LED “Open” sign. I also would love to have more IT staff. Of course I would!  And I have been saying for my entire career that we are shifting to a more professional/managerial workforce.

It may well be that Jeff’s students arrive completely steeped in research skills — which I doubt — and that McMaster’s faculty also self-update in this knowledge. But on this mortal coil, I would consider it sinful and wrong to eliminate a key service I considered crucial to the mission of our university, and crucial to our fundamental obligation to our students and faculty.

* Note, we didn’t have scheduled reference hours for at least the previous decade, and it would have been hard to do it during that period. But with the addition of .5 FTE temporary halftime reference support shortly before my arrival, as well as a new librarian who is willing to work half his time “on the desk” — a daunting schedule he nevertheless believes in — we eke out a slender but highly-prized reference — er, research help — schedule. We work our fingers to the bone, but we make it happen–because we are librarians.

Now I have the added concern that Jeff’s blatherings will be read and taken seriously, not only as a blueprint for library restructuring, but also as a valid interpretation of what librarianship, at essence, really means to all of us, in and out of LibraryLand.

Like Jenica, I don’t speak for my university. But I do feel I can and should speak on behalf of librarianship. And if Jeff has done me one small favor, it is that in studying his words, I feel more than ever the rightness of my leadership and decisions.

In the end, what matters, and what we are about, are the ancient truths of librarianship: organizing, managing, making available, preserving, and celebrating the word in all of its manifestations; helping our users build skill sets the fundamentals of which (if not the ephemeral details) will last a lifetime; and celebrating and defending the right to read, however that word is interpreted. This is what we do. This is who we are. This makes us librarians.

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Roy Tennant, WilsWorld edition

Roy Tennant just posted a marvelous set of advice for new(er) librarians in Library Journal.  To riff on his points, allow me to remind my Gentle Readers of my post about mentoring from 2008 (and if you liked that post, also see this one, about how mentoring was key to restoring my faith in myself during a rough time).

Tiny Objection: Roy says he hasn’t had time for what he calls the “pain” of “governance” (ALA committee work), and yet his first piece of advice is to find “fellow travelers.” Roy, not surprisingly, has forged his own path and peer groups independent of complex organizations; that’s one of his gifts. But we aren’t all Roys.

If ALA serves any core value at all to new librarians, it is to give them a place to build peer relationships, learn teamwork, find out what they value in their peers, and mingle with people who are at various places in their professional lives.  This is truer than ever before, thanks to our ability to connect in almost-real-time with librarians worldwide.

Tiny Observation: I say this in my 2008 post, but let me reiterate that it’s key for bosses to understand that they nearly always cannot be a real mentor to their own employees, nor can they find these relationships for their staff. Bosses can coach, lead, inspire, guide, and encourage, but mentoring is something else altogether.

What bosses CAN do is…

• Encourage the activities that lead to mentoring opportunities — even if you’re broke, there are many opportunities. You just have to find them;
• Be mentors to others outside their organizations — to sharpen their self-awareness of what their own staff are going through (and no matter how good you are, that adjustment phase is hard, just as it is for any job); and,
• Be the best boss you can be — which is something I’m focusing on these days, since it is part and parcel of my goal to have MPOW become the best small private library in California.  Part of my journey is through a workbook called “Be a Great Boss,” which was gifted to me by a librarian colleague. This book has a Facebook group as well (closed–not sure why) and I’ve just posted my first week’s efforts.

P.S. One last must-read: Linda Absher’s post about what makes librarianship worthwhile (spoiler alert: because we’re all about continuity, sharing, empathy, and long term preservation of the cultural record).

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Torture irons on the ship SUCCESS (LOC)

Last weekend on Twitter I saw a post:  “Tell me your favorite books on failing and failure, especially as it relates to innovation and leadership.”  I responded with this comment: “another blog post I don’t have time 2 write: how failure is overrated, & often confused w iterative design.”

I got up a little earlier than usual this on Monday (thanks to a cat who was licking my face) and decided to see if I could succeed (as in, not fail) at a 20-minute post on this topic. Cindi Trainor does a good job of capturing some of my thoughts, but I wanted to paraphrase/amplify, if only in the spirit of chiming in. I’ll use my writing experience to add crunchy bits of flavor and texture.

I know the conversations about failure are intended to get us comfortable with owning up to the idea that we don’t always succeed, and that if you don’t break a few eggs, you’ll never make an omelette (or something). That’s terrific. But let’s be clear that succeeding is personally and professionally more rewarding than failing. The delta is the difference between how I feel when I get a rejection letter and how I feel when I get that magic email or phone call that an essay has been accepted for publication.

Furthermore, claiming you’re comfortable with failure is dangerous if what you’re really doing is being uncomfortable with iterative design and group input. Don’t give up too early in the design process, and for God’s sake, set your vanity aside and let others help you. A good idea may need tuning; it will nearly always need iteration, particularly after it’s been tested in anything like a functioning environment.  If you love your idea, if you think it’s valid, you owe it more than one try.

(I cannot tell you how many times, late in the survey design process, I have to insist that yes we DO need to test the survey one more time–and I’m talking about surveys I’ve designed, not others. You don’t get a do-over once you launch a survey, just like you get one chance to submit an essay to a literary journal. That last 10% of effort separates good from great.)

Invention usually comes from individuals (a point Roy Tennant has made more than once), but it takes a village to bring ideas to life. One phenom I’ve observed in work organizations here and there is discomfort with feedback, coupled with the mistaken idea that input on a design immediately voids the value of the original creator’s effort. My guess is this stems from how we approach higher education these days, which is to emphasize individual achievement–a very artificial model.

I have heard workers say, “Well, I can’t take credit for this idea, because others helped me.”  I acknowledge all the people who help me with my own writing, but in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s me and my keyboard, revising my essay. It’s still your idea, even if someone told you it would be better off purple, not green.

I’ve also observed workers losing interest in an idea once they received feedback on it. Absolutely we want to acknowledge people who participated in making an idea come to life. But it doesn’t negate the value of the original idea.

My first semester in the MFA program, back in 2004, I observed one very smart, skilled writer dropping out of the program within weeks of starting. My take then (never voiced, just pondered) was that this  person could not cope with the very radical level of feedback provided in the workshop environment. This writer liked the idea of “succeeding,” writer-style — to see a work improved enough to be ultimately published — but was not able to handle what success actually required.

My suspicions were further solidified several years later, when I was running a writers’ workshop in Florida and two new members were introduced who unsettled the group for several months through their discomfort with feedback. Needless to say, neither would-be writer had much success getting anything published. But their unhappiness with anything less than glowing confirmation of their writing skills translated into disruptive behavior that threatened the very core of the group. Fortunately, this kind of person is at heart a quitter, and quit they did, before we had to take the final steps to “evict” them.

Are you declaring failure too early  because you’re pain-averse? Almost never have I observed a writing workshop where feedback was intended to kill a writing idea, but the best feedback is necessarily painful–excruciating, I-hate-myself, I-suck, I-am-not-a-writer, pound-the-steering-wheel-all-the-way-home painful.

A writer submitting a manuscript to her peers believes deep down that this will be the time when the other writers say, “This work is perfect.” A writer needs to think that this response is possible; it’s what forces you to give your all to a manuscript for hundreds or thousands of hours upon end only to share it with other people whose role it is to tell you what works, but also, what doesn’t work. A writer may spend thousands of hours on a manuscript only to be told by trusted peers that it needs overhauling top to bottom, or hundreds of pages need to be tossed, or that second-person-omniscence really isn’t working, or magical realism doesn’t belong in a recipe collection. But a writer who wants to succeed will subject herself to the process willingly, fully aware that pain lies ahead.

By the way, if you think most good ideas, or literary works, are extracted in the space of a long afternoon, think again.  Most writers have to curl their hands and breathe shallowly when people say, “Oh yeah, I keep meaning to take a day and write a short story,” and only fantasies about this person’s comeuppance help us survive these moments. (Anne Lamott said it better in Bird by Bird, which should be required management reading; note that her subtitle is Some Instructions on Writing and Life). A long afternoon is about how much time it takes to produce five paragraphs, four and a half of which will soon end up on the cutting-room floor, with or without your workshop’s help (since the purpose of a workshop is to gradually build the governor in your brain that does their work for you), so that the remainder can be revised ten times over.  The same is true of the execution of nearly any good idea.

Finally, the failure may not be in the idea, but how it is introduced and managed. A good idea needs curation: coordination, timing, communication, care and feeding, iteration. Someone tweeted Lombardi’s truism that winning isn’t everything, it’ s the only thing. I don’t buy that, because I’ve learned a lot from good ideas that I couldn’t bring to life (and also because it’s heartless). But you can’t win/succeed/not-fail if you aren’t willing to accept that the response to your great idea may be that it can’t be executed the very minute you think it up and without any modification or coordination. In an organization with the resources to execute ten good ideas, the eleventh idea either has to bump something else off the table, or it will have to wait.

Patience, grasshopper. “Not now” is not the same as “no.”  Sometimes a great idea needs to wait its turn; sometimes it is simply precocious, and in a year will be timely. Other times, a great idea has lost its prime moment and needs to be left behind on the altar of things that could have happened in an alternate universe. You’re all the better for having had a great idea; there will be many more.

Yes, winning is part of it, but learning how to win is even bigger. I didn’t complete this post on Monday; I had to get to work, and it wasn’t done. It was better to let it marinate a day while I forged on to other things. It’s still not much as far as writing goes–it’s a hasty blog post, not an essay in the New Yorker, and my expectations for it are low.  The essay I worked on for an hour and a half early this morning, on the other hand, will take many more hours to reach its first draft, and I will willingly break my heart ten times over, shredding the essay to pieces, reconstituting it, spending sunny days staring at a screen, to see it succeed.

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"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

I was teaching a library-science class about a decade ago when a student snaked her hand into the air.

“You know how no good deed goes unpunished?” she asked.

“No,” I said, and continued lecturing.

I knew where she was going with that question, because I knew her from another context, where she was the self-designated killjoy who approached every project confident of its failure–which, for the record, is an excellent way to ensure failure happens. She’s the one who will ask, “Just to play Devil’s advocate”–as if Satan needed any help.

And we have all sat in meetings where this person  dwelled ad infinitum on every possible thing that could go wrong with a good idea that hadn’t even been launched, or itemized in exquisite detail the inevitable failings of any good idea in progress. There have been times when I have been this person (and will be again in the future), and for this I humbly repent.

I was reminded of this moment recently when I read the (relatively mild) commentary on an article in Library Journal, “Netflix-inspired Pilot Program for Borrowing in California Library Languishes,” and then, reluctantly, prodded from a Tweet, turned my eyes to this post by the Annoying Librarian (yes, I know that’s not her real fake name). It was at that moment I realized why I loathe her: because I’ve suffered her kith and kin at nearly every library job I’ve ever had.

Which leads into a response I’ve wanted to post for a while about what directors do for a living.

In my last post about my concerns about eBooks and the traditional lending model, a commenter said something I’ve heard many times in different guises: “I think the problem lies in the fact that a lot of librarians and admin don’t really know shit about eBooks. Admin’s role has changed from less about being the guardian of the library to more of a fundraiser/politician role.”

I’m not singling out Justin, but I have wanted to respond to his comment for over a month, and the Netflix-lending posts only fueled my desire to do so.

If I have to point to my professionally challenges for the year ahead, it is all about fundraising and politics. I realize it’s awfully cute that I work in such a small library that I end up washing dishes, hanging pictures, and (teeth gritted) cataloging books.  I  am also tech-savvy enough that my staff don’t have to get out the flannel board and hand puppets to have a conversation with me about eBooks, and I bet that is a relief to them. (Though we are also fortunate to have a true geek on board in charge of library systems–an unusually strong resource for a tiny library–and we are also all tech-literate, which is no coincidence, either.)

But I don’t have a list posted to my wall about the tech issues I need to grasp over the next year. Instead, my wall features my professional goals, blown up in type large enough to read from my desk, and they are all related to my “fundraiser/political role.”  In fact, looking over the last 14 months, and at the year ahead, all of my successes, my challenges, and my successes-in-progress directly relate to that role. It’s my job, the one I was hired to do.

Our biggest challenge in libraries right now is about how we position ourselves within the stakeholder/funding process, and much of that has to do with strategic communications. I strive for this not only through direction (I have a strategic-communications document, though that’s an understatement, because nearly everything I have done in the past year relates back to how we communicate) but also, I hope, through example. I recently faced a daunting challenge that for a while had me very frustrated. But I chose to face this challenge with a positive face forward every single day, to stay on message and upbeat, and to turn it into a win for the library.

My director peers who don’t entirely understand eBooks can be forgiven. They have a daunting job these days: to keep libraries positioned.

I realize not all admins are approachable, have an interest in information technology, or want to know. But if there’s something absolutely crucial your “admin” needs to know, you have a responsibility to make every effort to find a way to share this knowledge with them. If the “admins” don’t know “shit” about eBooks, it’s the job of those who do to find a way to communicate crucial facts to them: just what they need to know, and no more than that, and in a manner in which the information can be quickly absorbed.

So now, back to Hayward Public Library. Here we have a director trying something new, and then being transparent that it hasn’t worked out yet.  I found it interesting that this story made Library Journal at all (slow week?), but at that point it was inevitable that AL would begin shouting.

If there’s one thing writing has taught me, it is that shitty first drafts are a necessary part of the process, and that second, third, and fourth drafts aren’t much better. In fact, as a writer, I have to bite back the snark when someone says, “Oh yes, I’ve been meaning to write a story one of these days,” as if good literature were something banged out in a single session on a stray weekend afternoon, and not something extracted through exhausting, nausea-generating iterations (cue Jack Nicholson in The Shining, typing the same sentence over and over and OVER).  It’s understandable; excellence appears effortlessness.

But excellence also requires much behind-scenes sausagemaking and experimentation. This is particularly true for new ideas. It is extremely hard to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas early in the iterative design process (and that goes for everything from writing and homebrewing to designing library buildings). Sometimes the goal is right, but the method needs rethinking. Sometimes the goal itself needs rethinking. And sometimes a good idea just needs time, timing, and tweaking to triumph. You will just not know until you’ve put some effort into it for a while.

It can be heartbreaking to walk away from an idea you’ve poured work into, but it’s part of the process. The significantly harder part of any idea is believing in it before it’s fully-baked, when the effort to make it happen outstrips the apparent payoff, and you feel the impatience of others, hear the negative voices, sniff the faint odor of doubt. That’s the point where you need to have faith in things unseen.

But none of this bothers the Annoying Librarian, because she’s all about the turd in the punch bowl, the preemptive negativism, the soul-sucking, nasty worldview in which no good deed goes unpunished and They are always against Us. It’s a convenient, lazy perch, particularly when you do it behind the lack of accountability that  anonymity provides. It’s good for page views and quick laughs at the expense of whatever idea she’s excoriating at the moment. But it doesn’t make the world a better place. It doesn’t make you a better person, either.

I forced myself to view the Annoying Librarian’s site once more before ending this post, and she’s true to form: there she is saying “I hate to say I told you so.” The facts don’t matter; it’s just another instance where she correlates something she doesn’t like with failure, however tenuous the connection.

Thing is, AL doesn’t hate to say she told us so, not one bit (any more than anyone using that expression feels that way). Like the Dementors, she keens for the moment of destruction; she loves failure more than the creative spark of life itself.  Devil’s advocate? She’s his liege.

I don’t know if Hayward has found the right solution yet. But they tried something new, were up front about it, and are clearly interested in positioning the library for the future. The director seems less interested in the mechanics of this particular approach than addressing the root problems that led to this experiment.

He’s on his game. I’m trying to be on mine. You do your part, too, whether it’s reaching a little harder to explain to your boss about eBooks, thinking twice before you make that negative comment or laugh at a cheap shot, or forcing yourself to go into your next meeting with the most positive spin on things you can muster (you may be surprised at how good you feel when you do this). We have a lot of work to do, those of us who care fiercely about libraries, and we need all the help–and faith–we can get.

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For those of you not steeped in all things open source, this brouhaha may not even be on your radar scope.

It boils down to this: a company, Liblime, long associated with Koha open-source library software, has chosen to develop some custom, non-open-source code for a customer.

As I understand it, the effect of this decision on the Koha project is to “fork” the code — that is, there will now be two flavors of Koha: the free-and-open version, and the version that has the custom code. Liblime is within its legal rights to do this, but Liblime’s actions have dismayed many members of the Koha community.

Liblime has also suffered some staff attrition. Nicole Engard, for example, has resurfaced doing Koha work for another Koha support company. But that, in a sense, “proves” the health of the open source model, where at least on paper, no project is beholden to any one vendor. Fortunately for Koha, it is still bigger than Liblime.

Yet lessons-learned abound. This kerfuffle not only represents a systemic change for Koha-the-software, but has surfaced a constitutional crisis for the project itself.

Like a lot of software projects, Koha’s movement toward coherent self-government has lagged behind its software development and adoption, and this has left the project in a position where no one legally-recognized entity can say to Liblime, “No, you can’t do that.” Koha has a nascent user group, and has been talking about a foundation, but it hasn’t got to a place where Koha belongs to Koha, with a clearly-defined legal entity.

I think that’s what Marshall Breeding was getting at, in part, when he stated, somewhat awkwardly, that the Koha project has  “a very developer-focused perspective” that would be improved by more participation and engagement from the librarians whose libraries use Koha — that is, the broader community.

In Marshall’s view, open source projects should be librarian-centric; “libraries should manage the governance of the software, while establishing conditions that encourage participation by vendors that provide services to the community of libraries that rely on the software.”

I’ve heard this theorizing from other sources. Why, all those developers need is for the librarian grownups to provide “adult supervision.” (Actual words heard verbatim.) They’ll take over those projects (also heard in the field) and make them effective through their excellent project management skills. Etc.

Unfortunately, project management expertise is in short supply in LibraryLand, and it isn’t usually valued like other skills. That’s evident from the facts: to date, there are few if any examples of successful librarian-centric open source software projects, with actual working code used in live production environments. (Someone suggested yesterday that the Notis project would be worth examining, as an example of strong software leadership early in LibraryLand’s history.)

Librarians do bring terrific skills to the table. We have a strong service orientation. We are practical. We understand what these products must do, and we have a firm grasp on timelines and calendars. We also have an appreciation for order, governance, and transparency. But we simply don’t (yet) have the core competencies to do what we did one hundred years ago — design, build, and manage our own tools.  We lost our way several decades ago, and we need to acknowledge that we can’t get out of this forest on our own.

There are some large, airy, well-funded LibraryLand schemes that remind me of the joke about the Unitarian who was headed to heaven, until he saw the sign, “This way to a discussion about heaven.” There are  some small test pilots here and there. Then there is also the warning example of Vufind, which in a year-long leadership vacuum spawned enough forks for a dinner party, and is now just shakily reassembling itself.

The reality is that neither model works on its own: not the code-focused project where one vendor can cause a major breach, and not the library-centric project endlessly spinning its wheels in a thousand thousand thousand committee meetings. We need one another; we benefit and learn from one another.

Evergreen would never have gone live as real-world production software if librarians in Georgia hadn’t participated in its design (and if, in the ying-yang of good process, developers hadn’t then locked themselves in rooms and coded like crazy). Now, just after its third birthday, Evergreen’s community — perhaps shaken by events ensuing in Kohaland — is having a healthy and upbeat conversation about formalizing its governance.

It truly takes a village — in many senses of that phrase. The health of an open source project, particularly for software developed for people who are not developers, depends on true diversity in participation — developers, librarians, sage administrators, brash young folks willing to experiment — and an honest acknowledgment that healthy project leadership will be inclusive of all these roles.

That means a lot of discussion and compromise, and yes, a few committee meetings. It means that a slice of the effort of any project will be devoted to building and governing that  village, and that everyone is in agreement that this is necessary work. But I think real events unfolding right now have demonstrated once again what every major open source project outside of LibraryLand already knows: there is no other way.

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“People need to get over the idea that ebooks are ‘just’ books,” Tim wrote. “Just because you can read it, doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. Books are socially and legally situated. You can’t change the delivery and legal structure, and expect everything else to remain the same.”

E-books are disruptive in ways we can barely comprehend, and all the self-congratulatory nattering at conferences about trends and digital humanities and big-ass repositories doesn’t change that a bit. It’s easy to laugh off early efforts at e-books, but is there anyone who really thinks the future of publishing—if not five years, then ten or fifteen—is not primarily digital?

And none of the current big players —Amazon, Google, not even Pogue’s beloved Apple—are in it for the passion of connecting books and readers. No matter how much they posture otherwise, the bottom line for them is profit, pure and simple.

As an author and librarian, I am greatly ambivalent. The writer in me sees opportunities I don’t have in the paper world. I am considering publishing a chapbook of essays via the Kindle and seeing if Kindle-readers—a community who by definition read heavily—will buy what is essentially unpublishable in the paper-based publishing economy.

But the librarian in me is worried, both on behalf of libraries—the bulwark of free speech in an open society—and on behalf of readers everywhere. And the writer with her eye on the future of writing — not for the next year or two, but the next century or two — is bothered as well. I worry that post-paper reading will become an event as closely and expensively metered as parking in downtown San Francisco. It’s doubtful that writers, journalists, and the rest of us in the writing trenches will benefit.

And if you agree that publishing is moving to a digital mode, you are also tacitly agreeing that the traditional role of libraries will soon be made obsolete. The delivery of reading to the next generation will be managed by digital mammoths who will control what and how we read to a fare-thee-well.

Since Pogue’s article was published, the Times added an “Editor’s Note” that comforts me not a whit:

EDITOR’S NOTE | 8:41 p.m. The Times published an article explaining that the Orwell books were unauthorized editions that Amazon removed from its Kindle store. However, Amazon said it would not automatically remove purchased copies of Kindle books if a similar situation arose in the future.

But these books weren’t removed “automatically.” They were removed by humans, who were following orders — just as some human, somewhere, chose to alter Amazon’s search results to hide GLBT titles. Each time, a well-publicized kerfuffle reversed Amazon’s decision, but the point is that the decision was made at all.

What we are learning is that the same technology that makes a book conveniently available on your Kindle in a manner of minutes can easily change that content or entirely remove it. Barbara Fister commented on my Facebook page, “I’m waiting for a little libel tourism to lead to books edited before your very eyes. How efficient!” Sadly, I don’t think we have to wait very long. Like the e-gov-documents that magically morphed and vanished during the Bush administration, the unseen silent workforce at Amazon will obediently carry out the mandate of the company.

Perhaps—to shift from Orwell to Bradbury—the ending of Fahrenheit 451 is prescient in other ways. Once the digital world has taken over — perhaps with legislative support, the way that track-building and trains yielded to automobiles and highways through the influence of energy lobbies — there will be outliers hiding in forests who are the voices of freedom and reading, while the rest of the world follows the dictates of the blinking screen.

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In libraries, for instance, I advocated for protecting the book budget but advocated against spending to buy television sit-coms, such as Seinfeld. Also, as a long-term strategy, I advocated for abandoning the Dewey Decimal System (DDS) and advocated for a more user-friendly method such as that used by any national book chain. The harsh reality is libraries are experiencing drastic cuts; the DDS is labor intensive in addition to being user-unfriendly, particularly so for literacy-challenged people. Other libraries across the nation have abandoned the DDS, and we should, too.

It seems to bother you that the Tampa Tribune latched on to your comments about libraries, but that’s because you made it so easy to do so.

First, most of us who actually work in this field refer to it as DDC. So if you want to look like you know what you’re talking about — and not as if you just Googled up an acronym from Wikipedia — don’t use “DDS.”

Second, I agree that for some collections of a certain size, there are other methods of organization that can work. But if there is anything that underscores how little you know about library management, it’s that in the middle of a budget crisis, reclassifying an entire library collection might not be an administrator’s first priority — or anywhere on the list. It’s not like you can flip a switch and relabel those books — not just on their spines but in the catalog as well. It’s a daunting task and it sorta explains why Dewey is ingrained in libraries — because libraries like to give people bang for the buck, and that generally means that reclassifying hundreds of thousands of books is right up there with needlepointing covers for the self-check machines.

Think about what you’re saying. Do you really think that when libraries are experiencing blockbuster usage despite severe budget cuts, when the value of libraries has never been clearer, and when library resources — not just books, but computers and people — are stretched to the absolute limit (and then beyond) as we assist the working poor, the unemployed, jobseekers, and the rest of society, you really think it’s a priority to reorganize books?

Why does that remind me of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

You also don’t get that many if not most libraries buy materials shelf-ready — already classified. That means it doesn’t cost any more to use Dewey than it does to use BISAC headings (used in bookstores) or any other classification system.

I only know of one library that is actively and intentionally using BISAC. It’s a success, but they did it with a brand-new opening-day collection for a small library.

As for wading into what libraries purchase, may I suggest — you being in South Florida and all — you not start with a television series featuring obviously Jewish lead characters? Just a hint.  Also, it’s hard to understand what you do think is worthy for libraries to collect. No sit-coms would mean no television classics such as I Love Lucy.

When it comes to selection decisions, overall, I suggest you not go there. You risk looking dumb.

If you want to come up with good ideas for libraries, here’s an idea: talk to the people who work there. We have a lot of good ideas, not all of them consonant with conventional wisdom. But if you’re looking to target wasteful spending, try to find something less ridiculous than how libraries organize books.

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