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RIP Michael Meyer Schneider

Sunday, May 23, 2010

I didn’t even check my voicemail when I got out of the hair salon, because I could see that my sister had tried to call me twice in a matter of minutes, which means  “serious family business.” I didn’t even really need to ask what it was about. My father has been in frail health for decades, and in very bad health for the last few years, and this is just one of those phone calls where you know what you will hear.

We are all relieved that Dad had a massive heart attack and died instantly. He never wanted to be in a nursing home–who aspires to that status, anyway?–and in large part due to the selfless efforts of Joyce, my stepmother, he avoided that sad coda.

I could go on about my father’s many wonderful qualities; I could go on about the stuff that was less than wonderful. Families are complicated; love is hard. I think I’d rather capture the memories that surfaced while my sister was talking. My dad was many other things–my stepbrother Ben calls him a “great statesman,” and I think of Dad as one of the last true liberals, a man who actually walked the walk, from the piers of San Francisco to the picket lines at segregated hotels to his last years in civil service–but he was also, very simply, my dad.

I am five years old and I have stretch pants with stirrups and a matching top. Dad takes me to the San Francisco wharf, where we sit for a little bit on the pier, and he then introduces me to one of his longshoremen friends, who asks me what 3 plus 2 is, and when I say 5, he gives me a nickel.

I am eight years old, and Dad drives me twice a week to the West Portal branch of San Francisco Public Library. We each take out the maximum at the time–8 books–which we cull from the new-book shelves, and for three days we will read and swap books, before returning the pile and getting another. Adult murder mysteries and police procedurals, to be precise. Sometimes I take a break and read things like A Secret Garden or A Wrinkle in Time, or even Mr. Potter’s Penguins, but mostly I am a gumshoe on a case.

I am of some age–who knows–and I am in a movie theater with my dad, who has an unmistakable honking laugh that instantly advertises to those that knew him that Michael Schneider Is In The House. The movie has its funny moment, Dad immediately laughs–henh henh HENH HENH HENH!–and then there is a pause and everyone else laughs at his laughter, and I am not even embarrassed because it is funny.

I am having dinner at Dad’s house (where? when? I do not recall) and I mention going to services at Glide Memorial. Dad pauses thoughtfully, and says in his trademark stammer, “Oh yeah, Cecil Williams. Buh-buh-back in the 60s we were arrested together for puh-picketing the Puh-Palace Hotel.”

It is the 1980s, and in their house on Douglas Street, Dad has a ficus he calls Benjy that is now roughly the size of a small oak tree. Joyce says she that when Dad brought Benjy home she had expressed great skepticism that Dad (no green thumb) could tend a plant, and that whenever Dad showed off Benjy, he wore what Joyce called his “shit-eating grin.”

It is 1987, and Dad is taking a trip in Europe and stops to visit me in the Huhnsruck where I am stationed in the Air Force. I pick him up and then become lost… lost… lost in the foggy roads late at night. I worry he will be angry at me, but he is patient and sweet. The next day I show him how just a few seconds on very low in my newfangled microwave oven can take the chill off those delicious German cold cuts, bringing them to perfect room temperature, and he is suitably impressed. I hope I took him to the Hotel Morbach for lamb mit spargel, or at least to our local Backerei.

It is 2004, and Sandy and I are in Dad and Joyce’s living room (during their brief relocation to Exeter), and when we show them our marriage certificate, my father is so excited he immediately trots to the next room to make a copy on his inkjet printer-copier.

It is early 2009 and I am waiting for my father at Old Ebbitt Grill (he and my stepmother relocated to DC a few years ago, after the Exeter Experiment). The restaurant is very crowded and I am worried because he is so frail. I see the crowd part, like the sea parting for Jesus, and there is my father, toddling very slowly with his cane, grinning as he sees me at the table.  The service staff are all smiling at him, perhaps in part because he is wearing an Obama button the size of a dessert plate.

There would be one more dinner a few months later at Old Ebbitt Grill (where he enjoyed crab, wine, and buttered bread with abandon, and I’m so glad he did–and Joyce was greatly amused by a pun I made about Proust), and that would be my last memory of Dad. He was wearing his Obama button, pinned to his khaki windbreaker, and he was smaller than ever, and tottered very slowly to and from the table, with long pauses between steps; and the service workers tilted their heads,  smiled his way, and ensured he traveled without harm; and he still grinned when he saw me.

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Surviving the Silly Season

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Note: if you’re a SCELC member reading this, I’m running for the SCELC Board, and I’d really appreciate your vote. My election statement is on the ballot. Voting ends May 21.

“Silly Season” is how I refer to the academic end-of-year period from about March through Commencement, a solid extrusion of busy-ness that crams together everything from final exams and commencement to next year’s contractual decisions. I’ve called it that for a long time, but now I’m living the dream.

You can add to that mix an annual consortium conference usually held in March that had to be moved to this week; preparing to interview candidates for a key position (and when your library has 4.0 FTE, every position is key); rolling out new-to-us services (I’ll have to look up the history of OCLC resource-sharing, but in this respect I think we’re catching up with 1985); and writing a slew of policy and procedure, most of it based on demand (“Do we have a donations policy?” “Hang on… I’m writing…”).

Also, due to unavoidable issues that pushed it out from its usual March scheduling, that consortium conference–SCELC’s annual colloquium and Vendor Day–fell this week, just two weeks before our master renewal invoice for electronic resources is due to SCELC, and due to the change of command at MPOW (new university president), small matters such as next year’s budget are still up in the air. So I am not really sure whether I need to add, cut, or hold the course on something that represents 20% of our entire budget, and I’m still absorbing new information from vendors we visited.

I’m also not sure what resources I have to keep our doors open after June 30 (the end of our budget year)–most specifically, student labor–so I have no idea what our hours are as of July 1, though I do have elaborate multi-colored spreadsheets for just about every scenario.

Then there’s a Dean’s Conference next Tuesday where with several faculty I’m presenting on a conference (the CUR Dialogs) I attended what feels like five years ago but was actually in February. My talk for CCLI went very well more on that later–I felt better about that talk then I’ve felt about any talk I’ve given in a long time–but it took its pound of flesh from me at a time when I didn’t have much flesh to spare.

But the reality is that no children or animals are harmed in this or any other Silly Season. It’s All Good. Awkward timing notwithstanding (and it couldn’t be helped), the SCELC conference reconnected me with old friends and introduced me to new colleagues. In this Saturday’s commencement I get to carry a walky-talky, wear an academic robe, and even shush people, which thrills me no end.  The students will go home or go out into the world. I’ll figure out what to say next Tuesday, and perhaps in doing so will finally tease out those grant ideas that have been rattling around my cerebral cortex for months. Eventually I’ll get a budget. The new position will be filled.

And last night, returning from Los Angeles, I was able to do what I love best of all: come home to the Bay Area.

It will begin again, ticking over, and there will be new experiences and challenges, surprises, disappointments, and delights, and we shall survive and even thrive through many more Silly Seasons, in academia, in other venues, in life itself.

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Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up

Saturday, May 1, 2010
Goose, by Flickr user HVargas

Goose, by Flickr user HVargas

I am doing a keynote address this coming Friday for the California Clearinghouse on Library Instruction and I cannot get my brain past the first three ideas I want to share. Help! Goose me!

The title of my talk is “Take the best and leave the rest,” which is the first problem. My original title was “Everything You Know is Wrong,” but I think they wanted something peppy. I’m the one who suggested “Take the best and leave the rest” as an alternate title, but it doesn’t even sound like me. It’s all squeaky and namby-pamby and sing-song and… ugh.

I do plan to address the title’s topic in my point about leveraging times of crisis for controlled burns–it’s a great time to let go of practices we know we shouldn’t be doing, under cover of economic crisis–but it’s not the focus of my talk.

However, I did one thing right: I just wrote to ask to be connected with my IT support for the talk. Years ago, when I was on the speaking circuit a lot on my own recognizance, I always, always did that, and it always, always was the right thing to do. I learned to do that the hard way, because there are a few too many people in LibraryLand who are simply dumbfounded by something like ensuring the projector doomaflatchy is available. You might think that someone wouldn’t organize a major event and fly someone cross-country–someone who has spent many hours cooking up a talk–and yet not make sure the crucial doomaflatchies were available, but you’d be wrong. (And now that I’m on a MacBook I absolutely must tape that little white video dongle to my forehead before I leave the house on the day of the talk.)

I feel in my heart of hearts that CCLI, of all groups, would get this stuff right, but What If the person in charge of all things important gets sick or has a family crisis? (That has happened.) Or What If it’s a venue they haven’t used before, and we’re both badly surprised? (That has happened, too.)  I’ll sleep better, and that’s reason enough for this belt-and-suspenders approach. (Sometimes it takes persistence–”Don’t worry, we have it under control!”–but I do have this ace up my sleeve: I’m the speaker.)

Naturally, “Everything You Know is Wrong” is intended to be playful, but the core of my talk is about moving toward evidence-based, well, everything, so it isn’t wrong. I’m starting with research findings related to students’ information-seeking behaviors. I’m using data from OCLC, Project Information Literacy (yes, I am on the PiL board–my compensation is I sometimes get to yak with Alison Head, one of the most interesting people I know), and anything else I can find in the next week.

One of the findings that emerges again and again is that librarians are at the bottom of the list of the resources students will use for help with research papers and other information needs. I keep worrying that finding is old hat and I’ll come across as some old geezer yammering about stuff everyone already knows and they’ll all start Tweeting about how they could have invited someone really sharp to come talk but no, they are wasting their time listening to an old wash-up. Which is scary because I usually go into a presentation thinking I’ll do at least credibly.

Should I pull a Lee Rainie and find some tweets about myself–critical as well as flattering? Wait, I don’t really think I get discussed on Twitter anyway. Pre-Twitter, I was famously heckled at Code4Lib, and attendees later complained that the talk wasn’t “technical” enough–that might be useful stuff.

How else could I frame this talk that would be fresh and amusing? Should I engage the audience more? Should I talk about high-octane stuff I did in the past and joke about being a busy administrator? (Remember Michael Gorman? Good times!)

I also want to talk about how we need to do assessment better in LibraryLand. I did something difficult several weeks ago: I handed out evaluation forms for two information literacy sessions I was conducting. That was a new thing for our library, and I felt I could not ask anyone to do what I would not do myself.

The first session was one of those technology tailspins where my classroom changed at the last minute, the projector was ordered for the wrong time so it had to be hustled in from elsewhere, the authentication wasn’t working and I was suddenly fumbling to log into the databases, and by the time I started my talk I was flustered and off my game.

I’m sorry that I’m not the cool cucumber who doesn’t get flustered, but that’s someone else. If there’s enough challenges, I will crumble a bit around the edges. So despite having an outline, I didn’t ground them well, I rushed them through stuff, I had any number of blips during my talk, and the evals were simply OK. No checkmarks below average, no “you suck” comments, but OK. Which meant that my one hour with these students, who may never get another info lit class again, was not all it could be.

For the  second session, I got into the room in advance, got all hooked up, felt comfortable with the slick new Smartboard (I’ve used them in previous lives), and was largely fluster-free. Plus the students were a little late so I was waiting for them, not vice versa. I followed my timed agenda, deviating a little when it seemed right to do so, but largely clipping along where I needed to be. I felt myself grounding them in the talk… felt the synergy… felt the mojo… felt the pacing click along… and the evals were excellent. I should send them to my mother.

In any event, I feel I did right by the students for both classes by having them do evaluations of my instruction. Which boils down to a point I want to make in my talk about measuring versus assessing. We do the former a lot. We need to focus more on the latter. Again, I’m hoping that’s not something everyone at CCLI has already assimilated and gone on board with.

One other point I want to make is know your users better. We make a lot of assumptions. At MPOW, I’ve had faculty tell me that all of their students own laptops. Working in the library, we know anecdotally that a lot of our students are dependent on campus computing–some entirely. We need to prove that (keep reading), but we see it every day.

Also, course evals may be important, but they still don’t answer the question: are students learning what they need to know?

We’re planning to use Project Sails this fall at MPOW to benchmark and then assess information literacy acquisition. (There’s an optional survey section in this product where we will also ask them a question about their computing environments–do they have a computer, a laptop, a smartphone, etc.)

(Though I am dying to do that tech asssessment as part of our “Hawk Day” registration activities… hmmm. We could even begin our assessment May 22, the first registration day, and repeat this six times over the summer. Hmmm, hmmmm, hmmmmmmmmm.)

I am looking forward to informating not just the students’ baseline skills, but how well we are addressing them. Project Sails is soon going to have the capacity for individual measurement, and when that happens, I’ll go first. (In fact, a faculty member who heard about Project Sails commented that she felt faculty should take it, too… which leads back into my talk, given the key role faculty play in students’ information literacy. Who should we really be teaching?)

A wise soul wrote me this past week to suggest using part of the database budget for marketing databases better, per a study that was done some years back, and though I need to wait to see what’s happening with our 2010-2011 budget, I’m in agreement that having one or two fewer resources but getting more usage out of what we have makes sense. But it doesn’t stop at marketing; evaluating usage matters as well. (The wise soul in question would probably agree that assessment and marketing go together.)

Developing a culture of assessment reminds me of how I first learned public speaking at Squadron Officer School, the Air Force’s charm school for junior captains. We presented to our peers and we were videotaped. Our peers gave us real-time feedback, and we reviewed the videos later. This was painful, but extremely effective.

I still remember one young pilot who had a problem with saying “Uh,” and our instructor had us repeat “Uh” whenever he said it. Cured him but good. There are several LibraryLand presenters, some quite well-known, who have tics that would go away forever if they watched themselves even once, such as the presenter who grunts a little “Enh” at the end of nearly every sentence. (In HomebrewLand, one occasional guest on Basic Brewing Radio has almost the same tic, but it’s a nasal “Anh” at the beginning of each sentence.)

How willing are we to self-inflict pain in order to improve? I wonder if that’s key to my talk.

Anyway, I have got to get this talk done… and it has to happen at home, preferably this weekend, as during the week I get home, exercise, eat dinner, and last another hour before I fall asleep…. not quality time. I get to work too early for creative time in the morning before I leave our apartment.

Anyway, ideas welcome, and my humble thanks for making it to the end of this think-out-loud post.

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Yet another portmanteau position at MPOW

Monday, April 26, 2010
Are you a spork?

Are you a spork?

We’ve posted another position at My Place of Work — one that like the last position for Head of Access Services (now filled by an excellent librarian-to-be) is designed to be transformative. Not to mention fun, absorbing, interesting, challenging, and greatly satisfying.

I’m a little — well, really, quite — unhappy with how I worded the conclusion of the job ad:

This is a position ideally suited for a librarian with a solid grounding in traditional library services who seeks more responsibility and a wide range of job knowledge.

What I meant was “the technology part is really, really important — not just what you know, but your worldview and your ability to synthesize and evolve — but you also need to be a strong, upbeat library generalist with a penchant for learning.”

And what THAT means is you need to know a little MARC and a little XML, have a great teaching presence, have some insights into the database acquisitions process and a knack for working with vendors, get along with faculty, students, and staff, be able to switch quickly among tasks and know when a good B+ is acceptable and when it needs to be an A or a C, enjoy the challenge of working in a resource-limited environment, and be familiar enough with modern circ, reserves, ILL, and acquisitions practices to do everything from pitch in at the desk as needed to provide mile-high oversight for our book selection process, which is being reoriented toward faculty selections and shelf-ready materials.

And then, as needs change and evolve, do other things As They Arise. Edit: not to mention the reference hours, which if we are at flat funding (which is better than declining funding, the experience for many libraries this year) will inevitably include at least one night and every other weekend.

Short-range, the most pressing leadership opportunities for this position are information literacy and electronic resource management. (For you non-librarians out there, ERM is its own library specialty — them what’s in charge of the databases.)

We are rethinking information literacy: how it’s delivered, to whom, and by whom, and when; its assessment models, its benchmarking — all of it. This is not just a teaching responsibility, but a planning, sales, and evangelism position. The community is open to change here, but they need leadership. Plus you have to be able to see around corners and know what’s ahead.

(Speaking of which, immersed in spreadsheets galore, I’m already beginning to feel like the little old administrator who’s completely out of it… at MPOW folks were talking about Chrome for the Mac, and there I was peeping, “Chrome came out for the Mac? What?”)

ERM is currently juggled between me and our systems person, who is also responsible for educational technology for faculty. You do not need to be steeped in ERM experience, but you need to know what ERM is and why it’s important, and have the requisite technical and organizational skills to keep the ERM ship afloat — from remote-access configuration to thinking hard and strategically about the resources we license — so that I can spend  more time shaking the money tree and, if it yields fruit, gathering its harvest, while continuing and expanding events, outreach, and communications.

The list goes on. Recently the Education department agreed to a pilot for electronic theses. A peer university shared their policies and procedures. We even have a clean, empty ContentDM instance. Now it just needs to happen. The faculty are also clearly ready for a liaison program, and we need to divide responsibilities and plan that out. And so forth. Can we get to all of this? Well, I don’t know, but we can have fun trying. We are moving toward Navigator. We’re just a few, uh, tasks away. I can feel it. Just need a little more to make it happen.

As an aside, I hope you looked, and yes, we need to fix our website. I realize it’s quite possibly the world’s worst library website… ghastly, confusing, spartan, and yet too complicated, with mystifying jargon (“e-source”?). There’s a whole legacy behind that and now we’re all too busy to fix what needs fixing… This isn’t part of this position, but I do feel I should explain that we all know we need to do something about our digital welcome. We’ve done a lot with our physical welcome. I looked around today, and though we still have a lot of work to do, the library is beginning to look and feel inhabited and loved.   But the website… ah well. At least you know we know!

Anyhoo… MPOW (the library, but also the broader community it supports) is a place where nobody has enough resources, but we all want one another to succeed. I’ve worked in environments that were the polar opposite, and I know where I want to be. I hope you do as well.

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ACRL and “diversity”: A rainbow has more than one color

Sunday, April 25, 2010
Rainbow by Flickr user Proggie

Rainbow by Flickr user Proggie

My Place Of Work is one of the most diverse universities in the United States. That’s a fact we’re very proud of, and it’s an environment I enjoy. Diversity was a matter-of-fact reality in the middle-class San Francisco neighborhood I grew up in, and throughout my life, when I’ve been in environments flavored with only one or two dominant ethnic groups, I have missed God’s rainbow.

So when friends recommended the rather spendy but well-regarded ACRL-Harvard institute for new academic directors, I was intrigued to see that ACRL offered a “diversity” scholarship, until I read the fine print:

ACRL is pleased to announce the availability of a scholarship to support participation at the 2010 ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute. The scholarship covers the cost of tuition ($2,600) and a $1,500 travel stipend. In support of ACRL’s commitment to librarians serving diverse communities, the scholarship is for individuals currently working in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges or Universities, or those employed at Hispanic Serving Institutions.

In other words, ACRL’s “diversity” is limited to institutions serving dominant majorities of ethnic groups.

I have no quarrel with these universities being eligible for this scholarship. I went to a women’s college (well, two, to be precise–Mills and then Barnard) because I was seeking my own “dominant majority” experience, and I appreciate how important that can be, and I salute ACRL for their attention to these institutions.

But ACRL should think beyond such a narrow definition of diversity and include institutions that are doing the very hard work of serving highly diverse student bodies.

We have challenges at MPOW: many of our students are first-generation college students; many arrive woefully unprepared for their first year of college; many struggle financially. We also have strengths, perhaps the most notable being the ineffable benefits–professionally, but also spiritually–of living, studying, and working inside this numinous rainbow.

For that matter, why not add income level to the mix? Those of us in higher ed know the powerful ties between family income level and risk factors for student success. Isn’t economic status its own diversity challenge–the issue that Martin Luther King graduated to in his last years on this planet?

Not only that, but some schools have more money than others, and tuition-dependent schools serving first-generation students are the least likely to have $4100 sitting around. I feel very well supported by MPOW–this is the best library job I’ve ever had–but the need is great in so many directions here, and I’ve already been cannibalizing important line items to do things like update our ancient public computers, last “refreshed” in 2002 and 2004.  I’ve already robbed Peter to pay Paul, and I can’t turn around and hit up Mary for some dinero.

ACRL means well, but if it were truly committed to “librarians serving diverse communities,” it would broaden its definition of “diversity.” Meanwhile, I’ll keep scraping together my leadership education from my peers at equally diverse universities, while I continue enjoying life within the rainbow’s beautiful spectrum.

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One more notch up Maslow’s hierarchy

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Today is the go-live day of MPOW’s OCLC authorization for interlibrary loan. Prior to this, our ILL procedure involved paper forms, which partly explains why we did 4 ILLs last year, the other half of that being that we charged patrons, and the third half being that we hadn’t conditioned patrons that we provide this service.

So let me digress from the momentous occasion to ponder charging for ILLs. If we buy a book we think patrons might use, we don’t charge them. If we buy a book a patron requests, we don’t charge them. So why do some libraries–most of them, perhaps?–charge patrons for interlibrary loans, in some cases passing on the entire cost, in other cases charging a flat fee?

The answer can’t be that libraries are poor, because the syllogism then fails, due to the other conditions. My guess is it’s a mix of habit plus a view of the library budget that is focused on thingies rather than services (the  ownership/access seesaw). Charging for ILLs is also oriented toward the idea that the library makes most of the collection decisions. An ILL is, after all, a patron-driven selection.

Meanwhile, I need to get up and out, but–call me Nerdbrarian–my heart flutters that My Place of Work now has the capability to request and provide items worldwide. We’re still in need of procedures, policies, training, and marketing, but we have a chassis with four wheels and an engine in it!

Oh, and on conditioning patrons: at the EPA library I managed in the late 1990s, my boss, an engineer and a huge library supporter, said “People need to be conditioned to use libraries.” It’s absolutely true. A library is a truly amazing service, so amazing that no one could possibly divine all the things it can do for people. We can have wonderful services, but if patrons don’t know about them, the job isn’t complete.

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I’m a Big Fan of Fans

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Today someone said, “You know, the library even smells better these days!” I did not say, “Because the bathroom exhaust fans are working now!”

There really is no way in scholarly discourse to announce that certain corners within the Crucible of Higher Learning no longer have a rather distinct and unmistakable odor that gets worse as the day goes on. But to our joy, after nearly two decades, the bathroom exhaust fans have been repaired.

The library does indeed look better these days. Not only that, it smells better. It smells of fresh paint and lemon wax and sometimes a sandwich or two, and the only other fragrance is… nothing. Just clean air, like our future.

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VSTDPUs and Maslow’s Hierarchy

Saturday, April 10, 2010

One of my favorite library stories comes from the days when small public libraries in upstate New York were being encouraged to go online. A consultant went to visit a small library–one of those Barbie Dream libraries that are hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and staffed so minimally that the library worker covering the single desk will excuse herself to change the toilet paper and greet the UPS delivery person.

So the consultant explained to the library director that the online catalog could do this, and it could do that, and it would have all these marvelous functions, and the library would be so much farther ahead, etc. etc.

And the practical old librarian who had been quietly listening tilted her head and replied, “I’d still rather have a flush toilet.”

Maslow's Hierarchy

Maslow's Hierarchy

I’ve been a fan of Maslow’s Hierarchy since my military days. I have a writing friend who I encourage by using an image of Maslow’s Hierarchy whenever I give her written feedback. I point out that her work is near the top of the hierarchy, at the peak of self-actualization, whereas less-accomplished writers are near the middle or even the bottom of that pyramid.

I think a lot about Maslow’s Hierarchy in terms of strategic direction for a library at a VSTDPU  (Very Small Tuition-Dependent Private University). We do have flush toilets at MPOW. (We do not have an exhaust system, as becomes unfortunately apparent as the day progresses, but that is beside the point.) But we provide the best services possible within a constant reality of resource challenges that would flummox librarians at larger institutions.

Part of that service provision includes a ruthless focus on Maslow’s Hierarchy. We do not have the resources to do anything that is not directly applicable to service provision. Furthermore, as discussed earlier, even among those options, we have to cherry-pick very carefully, and decide that some things are not doable, even if they are important. Among those services we elect to provide, we have to provide clear-eyed assessment, and be willing to minimize or stop a service.

It’s possible for a library to become so focused on a traditional problem, such as a large cataloging backlog, to the point where other services go neglected. One decision I have made is that our cataloging backlog, however spectacular it may be, is not the most pressing problem for us at this time. Improving access to and awareness of resources, improving the aesthetics and comfort of the facility, increasing the library’s visibility, communicating with our stakeholders,  assessing our performance, measuring user needs, and ensuring the library is seen as a valued part of the university rank much more highly.

Most important of all is addressing information literacy. This is the pure and acute vector of tremendous student need and one of our professional core competencies. This is particularly acute at Holy Names, where many students are the first generation in their family to attend college, and it’s particularly acute in California, where school libraries are not mandated and the public school system is a mess, and it’s greatly exacerbated by the complexity of the world of scholarly information, where nothing is intuitive (it never was, of course, but now it’s the full opposite of intuitive) and we are running alongside the whole mess, changing tires on moving vehicles.

This is all a long wind-up to make a small observation. A couple of weeks ago we got one of those whiz-bang product offers that come our way, and it’s one of those products that if we were perched higher up the hierarchy would be too good to pass up: it’s a service to enable smartphone access to our web resources. And an enthusiastic library advocate for this service gave me the Big Sell.

The punchline here is that we don’t yet have a website worth accessing. We have a page with a handful of links, and we have a slew of online subject guides created by our temporary part-time adjunct librarian who I really hope we get to keep and if we don’t, may she go forth and do great things. We haven’t had the time or resources for a website. (In fact, that reminds me… I need to draft another internship, based on that.) We pretty much have what we need to stay afloat day-to-day.

So when I finally said, you know, we are simply not going to do this now, I’m sure I came off as one of those unhip administrators standing in way of really cool things we should be doing. And if I were up the hierarchy a bit more–and so were our students–I’d agree with that statement. Enabling smartphone access on our campus has one additional problem: most of our students don’t have smartphones. (Plus the pricing, while not bad, had a screwy scale; if your FTE for a product begins at 5000, you don’t “get” our situation.)

So I was feeling doltish about feeling so tepid about this, and then several things happened.

The first is that a student came in and hung her artwork on a freshly-rehabbed–and-painted wall (until very recently the home of dusty shelving filled with unused periodical indexes), and it made the library beautiful. People kept remarking on it. It was, to use a word the National Science Foundation adores, transformative.

Then we had a poetry and art event, where we read poems about spring and libraries and even cannibals, and ate brownies and tangerines, and we all agreed we needed more events like that. We have held three literary events this spring; I don’t know how, but we’ve done it. We have one more big hoo-ha on April 20 where we are rolling out our spruced-up facility with an all-campus barbecue, and I’m not sure how we’re doing that, either.

And I spent quite a bit of time this week peeling yet more layers from the history (or puzzle) of info lit at MPOW, to try to understand where we are, how we got here, and what we can do to give our students the best information literacy experience possible.

And then I taught two info lit classes to grad students, and in each one I said, I think, budget willing, we’re going to be able to license this software tool that will allow you to gather all your scholarly citations into one account (the idea of citation-management software being almost unknown on campus, even to most faculty), and the students were fascinated and excited.

And meanwhile, the handful of folks who are with me on that lowest level of Maslow’s kept weeding, and teaching faculty how to use technology, and planning new-technology roll-outs, and running daily reports what need to be run, and the student workers showed up and did a magnificent job as always. And we were, and are, and will be, very cool in our own right.

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Because of Libraries we can Say These Things

Thursday, April 8, 2010

I have this long post drafted about Maslow’s hierarchy and priorities and this and that. I guess it’s ok. But tonight I sat in a circle with students, faculty, and other friends and supporters of Peanut U, and first we celebrated the artistic achievements of a student graduating this spring, whose art now graces the library’s walls, and then we read poetry.

We read poems about hope and love and friendship and sisters; cannibalism and death; life and rebirth.

And we ate brownies and tangerines and drank lemon soda and cheap wine, and it was good.

And someone even got the quiet joke of the madelines I had purchased (“Look, I have a memory coming on!”).

And this is what I read:

Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things

She is holding the book close to her body,
carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,
down the tangled hill.
If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield. …

—

The book is a shield; the word is good. There are people who “get” why we need the Library as Place; why we need an intellectual center, a barycenter for our literary souls. For those people, I need provide no long-winded discussions of pyramids. For those people, a poem and a brownie will do.

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The Genteel Lady’s Compleat Guide to The Domestick Art of Homebrewing

Sunday, March 28, 2010
Saison du Mont

Saison du Mont, Big Brew 2009

Why don’t more women brew beer?

Women I consider capable of holding national office or even starting a new country have described to me how they stand by and watch men homebrew. I have also run into more than one woman at the homebrew store who was there to pick up the ingredients for the boyfriend’s brew day.

This may be because modern American homebrewing — a hobby that in the U.S. is legally only about thirty years old –  is dominated by men,  with the attendant big-batch, outdoorsy, size-matters, Gawd-you-won’t-believe-how-hard-this-is characteristics of masculinized cooking activities.

It’s not that women are sissies (although, full disclosure, I am strictly apres-ski when it comes to outdoorsy stuff), but that men-brewing-beer has become an incomprehensible cultural habit, like driving in circles to get a really good parking spot at the gym.

Yet once upon a time, it was the good housewife who milled the malted barley and brewed it with hops to make beer (afterwards giving it a good stir with her magic stick that impregnated it with yeast). In the 18th century, nearly 80 percent of all licensed brewers were women, and many ancient myths “credit the creation of beer to women,” as beer anthropologist Alan Eames noted some years back.

And she didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on fancy equipment, either… nor did she suspend all her other domestic activities to concentrate on her brewing… and she expected her beer to complement her other domestic products, such as the family dinner (if not breakfast and lunch, or even snack breaks for lactating mothers, for whom milk stout was recommended).

So, as a newbie who has nonetheless learned a few things in the past year, here are my insights for the woman who has considered homebrewing when the rainbow was enuff.

First, remember:   homebrewing is only cooking. Not only that,  it’s not particularly complex cooking.  If you can  clean your kitchen, use a measuring spoon, and make a grilled-cheese sandwich, you can make beer, right in the comfort of your kitchen.

If, like me, you like cookbooks, you’ll enjoy learning from the homebrew canon. The beginners’ books are Papazian and Palmer, and the Basic Brewing DVDs are fabulous. Cooking is very much visual technique — I once took a half-day class in cleaning and killing Dungeness crab, acquiring skills I’ll have for life — and seeing James and Steve sparge and vorlauf and lauter is worth the price of admission.

Plus don’t you feel a little happy inside saying “vorlauf” and “sparge”?

Beat the mystique. Many of the magic arts in homebrewing turn out to be simple crafts. I’ve read lengthy instructions for boiling  sugar with water. Cooks in the know call that a simple syrup. Some homebrewers will breathlessly suggest placing your ingredients on the counter to build a visual inventory before you begin brewing. Hello, mise en place?

Speaking of which, think food-friendly brewing. I love the great big India Pale Ales, I truly do.  On its own, or paired with a bold food such as blue cheese, a crisp, sassy, over-the-top-hopped glass of beer is a more interesting experience than just about any wine I could possibly afford.  But living in Germany, and near Belgium, for two years in the 1980s taught me that some beer styles pair beautifully with food. The current fad for hoppiest-brew-evah is fun, but if you’re thinking about integrating your beer into your cooking, look elsewhere — preferably toward Belgium (though several months back, dining at 121 in Providence, I paired a Pilsner Urquell on tap with a broiled duck leg, and can still taste the crisp-fruity malt tones mingling with the earthy gravitas of duck. Oh my…).

Despite all the huzzah over $300 brewpots and thousand-dollar “brewing sculptures,”  homebrew can be done fairly economically–at least cheaper than yachting or skydiving–and a lot of the equipment can be multi-purpose, such as my digital cooking thermometer and my humongous funnel.  My $69 starter kit has brewed some excellent beer (even after factoring in the occasional addition of a funnel or a replacement hydrometer), and because I know how to use measuring spoons, my bottle of sanitizer will last me til, hmmm, at least 2011.

If you have sunshine and space, you could even  grow hops. Like growing tomatoes at home, the point is less to save money (I once had a boss who calculated that his homegrown tomatoes cost about $5 each) but to enjoy truly fresh hops, something I experienced once, when a homebrew store clerk invited me to hold and crush a single dry hop flower from his garden.

Brew at the level that makes sense for you.   Moving to partial-mash or all-grain theoretically saves money, since grain is one-third the price of extract, but it more than doubles the amount of time you’ll spend brewing, and it introduces a complexity to the process that may not interest you.

It’s also ok to start with a mix — and to stay there, if that’s your speed. A good beer kit will produce far better beer than you’ll get at at most grocery stores, and kits are engineered to be close to foolproof. You will end up with five gallons of beer (contradicting my “brew small batches” suggestion), but if you watch your temperatures and keep everything clean, there’s a very good chance it will be five very decent gallons.

Your local homebrew store may have its own kits, and these generally make wonderful beer.  My first three beers were “kit beers” (an ESB, a porter, and E.J. Phair’s Phat Quail Ale).  There are also many, many good recipes, in books, on the web, and so on. I recently brewed a milk stout (despite no actual need for it, if you know what I mean) that came from a recipe scribbled on a recipe sheet by the owner of San Francisco Brewcraft.

Build brew projects into your household workflow. I don’t cook my dinners sequentially; the spinach, rice, and main course all come out at the same time. After several homebrewing sessions, I began questioning the sacrosanct “brew day” I kept  reading about (a project conducted out on the patio or in the garage, no less).

I did two five-hour partial-mash brew sessions on Saturday mornings before asking on a list, why can’t I break up this “day” into its components — mashing, and then brewing?

It turns out I can; I just need to cool the wort quickly and keep it sanitary (though how sanitary it really needs to be before a 60-minute boil is an interesting question).  Now brewing can be a background activity concurrent with other housewifely chores: dinner and cleanup for the mash, Saturday cleaning for the boil. I also do other things while I’m homebrewing, using the kitchen timer and notes to myself to stay on schedule. Heck, maybe I’ll skin a deer, or weave a new blanket… or not.

Take back that kitchen. Brew some beer today!

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