Free Range Librarian
type: channel
description: K.G. Schneider's blog on librarianship, writing, and everything else
date: 2019-05-27T16:21:56Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: (Dis)Association
items: I have measured out my life in Doodle polls
items: Memento DMV
items: An Old-Skool Blog Post
items: Keeping Council
items: What burns away
items: Neutrality is anything but
items: MPOW in the here and now
items: Questions I have been asked about doctoral programs
items: A scholar’s pool of tears, Part 2: The pre in preprint means not done yet

(Dis)Association
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2019-05-27T16:07:23Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I have been reflecting on the future of a national association I belong to that has struggled with relevancy and with closing the distance between itself and its members, has distinct factions that differ on fundamental matters of values, faces declining national and chapter membership, needs to catch up on the technology curve, has sometimes […]
encoded: <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" src="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2017-09-18-16.28.46-e1545496983690-1024x768.jpg" alt="Two large potted roses in a Radio Flyer wagon" class="wp-image-9042" width="277" height="208" srcset="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2017-09-18-16.28.46-e1545496983690-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2017-09-18-16.28.46-e1545496983690-300x225.jpg 300w, https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2017-09-18-16.28.46-e1545496983690-768x576.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 277px) 100vw, 277px" /> Walking two roses to their new home, where they would be planted in the front yard. I have been reflecting on the future of a national association I belong to that has struggled with relevancy and with closing the distance between itself and its members, has distinct factions that differ on fundamental matters of values, faces declining national and chapter membership, needs to catch up on the technology curve, has sometimes problematic vendor relationships, struggles with member demographics and diversity, and has an uneven and sometimes conflicting national message and an awkward at best relationship with modern communications; but represents something important that I believe in and has a spark of vitality that is the secret to its future. I am not, in fact, writing about the American Library Association, but the American Rose Society. Most readers of Free Range Librarian associate me with libraries, but the rose connection may be less visible. I’ve grown roses in nine places I’ve lived in the last thirty-plus years, starting with roses planted in front of a rental house in Clovis, New Mexico, when I was stationed at Cannon Air Force Base in the 1980s, and continuing in pots or slices of garden plots as I moved around the world and later, the United States. Basically, if I had an outdoor spot to grow in, I grew roses, either in-ground …

I have measured out my life in Doodle polls
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2019-04-11T01:55:15Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: You know that song? The one you really liked the first time you heard it? And even the fifth or fifteenth? But now your skin crawls when you hear it? That’s me and Doodle. In the last three months I have filled out at least a dozen Doodle polls for various meetings outside my organization. […]
encoded: You know that song? The one you really liked the first time you heard it? And even the fifth or fifteenth? But now your skin crawls when you hear it? That’s me and Doodle. In the last three months I have filled out at least a dozen Doodle polls for various meetings outside my organization. I complete these polls at work, where my two-monitor setup means I can review my Outlook calendar while scrolling through a Doodle poll with dozens of date and time options. I don’t like to inflict Doodle polls on our library admin because she has her hands full enough, including managing my real calendar. I have largely given up on earmarking dates on my calendar for these polls, and I just wait for the inevitable scheduling conflicts that come up. Some of these polls have so many options I would have absolutely no time left on my calendar for work meetings, many of which need to be made on fairly short notice. Not only that, I gird my loins for the inevitable “we can’t find a date, we’re Doodling again” messages that mean once again, I’m going to spend 15 minutes checking my calendar against a Doodle poll. I understand the allure of Doodle; when I first “met” Doodle, I was in love. At last, a way to pick meeting dates without long, painful email threads! But we’re now deep into the Tragedy of the Doodle Commons, with no relief in sight. Here are some Doodle ideas–you may have your own to toss in. First, when possible, before Doodling, I ask for blackout dates. That narrows the available date/time combos and helps reduce the “we gotta Doodle again” scenarios. Second, if your poll requires more than a little right-scrolling, reconsider how many options you’re providing. A poll with 40 options might as well be asking me to block out April. And I can’t do that. Third, I have taken exactly one poll where the pollster chose to suppress other people’s responses, and I hope to never see that again. There is a whole gaming side to Doodling in which early respondents get to drive the date…

Memento DMV
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2019-03-30T21:20:55Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This morning I spent 40 minutes in the appointment line at the Santa Rosa DMV to get my license renewed and converted to REAL ID, but was told I was “too earlyâ€ to renew my license, which expires in September, so I have to return after I receive my renewal notice. I could have converted […]
encoded: This morning I spent 40 minutes in the appointment line at the Santa Rosa DMV to get my license renewed and converted to REAL ID, but was told I was “too earlyâ€ to renew my license, which expires in September, so I have to return after I receive my renewal notice. I could have converted to REAL ID today, but I would still need to return to renew my license, at least as it was explained to me, and I do hope that was correct. CC BY 4.0, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/m8wh2kmc But–speaking as a librarian, and therefore from a profession steeped in resource management–I predict chaos in 2020 if DMV doesnâ€ t rethink their workflow. We’re 18 months out from October 2020, the point at which people will not be able to board domestic flights if they don’t have a REAL ID or a valid passport, or another (and far less common) substitute. Then again, California DMV is already in chaos. Their longtime leader retired, the replacement lasted 32 days, and their new leader has been there ca. 60 days. Last year featured the license renewal debacle, which I suspect impacted the man standing behind me. He said he was there to apply for his license again because he never received the one he applied for last fall. And California DMV is one of 10 states that still needs a REAL ID extension because it didn’t have it together on time. Indeed, I was on the appointment line, and nearly everyone in that line was on their second visit to DMV for the task they were trying to accomplish, and not for lack of preparation on their part. Some of that was due to various DMV crises, and some of it is baked into DMV processes. Based on how their current policies were explained to me today at Window 13, I should never have been on that line in the first place; somewhere, in the online appointment process, the DMV should have prevented me from completing that task. I needlessly took up staff time at DMV. But the bigger problem is a system that gets in its own way, like libraries that lock book dr…

An Old-Skool Blog Post
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2019-03-29T13:24:29Z
subject: American Liberry Ass'n
subject: Association Nerd
description: I get up early these days and get stuff done — banking and other elder-care tasks for my mother, leftover work from the previous day, association or service work. A lot of this is writing, but it’s not writing. I have a half-dozen unfinished blog posts in WordPress, and even more in my mind. I […]
encoded: I get up early these days and get stuff done — banking and other elder-care tasks for my mother, leftover work from the previous day, association or service work. A lot of this is writing, but it’s not writing. I have a half-dozen unfinished blog posts in WordPress, and even more in my mind. I map them out and they are huge topics, so then I don’t write them. But looking back at the early days of this blog — 15 years ago! — I didn’t write long posts. I still wrote long-form for other media, but my blog posts were very much in the moment. So this is an old-skool post designed to ease me back in the writing habit. I’ll strive for twice a week, which is double the output of the original blogger, Samuel Johnson. I’ll post for 15 minutes and move on to other things. I am an association nerd, and I spend a lot of time thinking about associations of all kinds, particularly the American Library Association, the American Homebrewers Association, the American Rose Society, the Redwood Empire Rose Society, the local library advisory boards, my church, and our neighborhood association. Serving on the ALA Steering Committee on Organizational Effectiveness, I’m reminded of a few indelible truths. One is that during the change management process you need to continuously monitor the temperature of the association you’re trying to change and in the words of one management pundit, keep fiddling with the thermostat. An association didn’t get that big or bureaucratic overnight, and it’s not going to get agile overnight, either. Another is that the same people show up in each association, and–more interesting to me–stereotypes are not at play in determining who the change agents are. I had a great reminder of that 20 years ago, when I served as the library director for one of those tiny Barbie Dream libraries in upstate New York, and I led the migration from a card catalog to a shared system in a consortium. Too many people assumed that the library staff–like so many employees in these …

Keeping Council
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2018-01-20T15:52:25Z
subject: American Liberry Ass'n
subject: Librarianship
description: Editorial note: Over half of this post was composed in July 2017. At the time, this post could have been seen as politically neutral (where ALA is the political landscape I’m referring to) but tilted toward change and reform. Since then, Events Have Transpired. I revised this post in November, but at the time hesitated […]
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-9015" src="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HK155_revTH.jpg" alt="Commemorative Coin, 1893 World Expo" width="236" height="236" srcset="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HK155_revTH.jpg 236w, https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HK155_revTH-150x150.jpg 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 236px) 100vw, 236px" />Editorial note: Over half of this post was composed in July 2017. At the time, this post could have been seen as politically neutral (where ALA is the political landscape I’m referring to) but tilted toward change and reform. Since then, Events Have Transpired. I revised this post in November, but at the time hesitated to post it because Events Were Still Transpiring. Today, in January 2018, I believe even more strongly in what I write here, but take note that the post didn’t have a hidden agenda when I wrote it, and, except where noted, it still reflects my thoughts from last July, regardless of ensuing events. My agendas tend to be fairly straightforward. — KGS Original Post, in which Councilors are Urged to Council Edits in 2018 noted with bolding. As of July 2017, I am back on ALA Council for my fifth (non-consecutive) term since joining the American Library Association in 1991. In June I attended Council Orientation, and though it was excellent–the whole idea that Councilors would benefit from an introduction to the process is a beneficial concept that emerged over the last two decades–it did make me reflect on what I would add if there had been a follow-on conversation with sitting Councilors called “sharing the wisdom.” I was particularly alerted to that by comments during Orientation which pointed up a traditional view of the Council process where ALA’s largest governing body is largely inactive for over 350 days a year, only rousing when we prepare to meet face to face. Take or leave what I say here, or boldly contr…

What burns away
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2017-11-17T05:29:04Z
subject: Santa Rosa Living
description: We are among the lucky ones. We did not lose our home. We did not spend day after day evacuated, waiting to learn the fate of where we live. We never lost power or Internet. We had three or four days where we were mildly inconvenienced because PG&E wisely turned off gas to many neighborhoods, […]
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-8993" src="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Home-Historic-Survey-Cropped-300x168.png" alt="" width="300" height="168" srcset="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Home-Historic-Survey-Cropped-300x168.png 300w, https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Home-Historic-Survey-Cropped.png 519w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />We are among the lucky ones. We did not lose our home. We did not spend day after day evacuated, waiting to learn the fate of where we live. We never lost power or Internet. We had three or four days where we were mildly inconvenienced because PG&E wisely turned off gas to many neighborhoods, but we showered at the YMCA and cooked on an electric range we had been planning to upgrade to gas later this fall (and just did, but thank you, humble Frigidaire electric range, for being there to let me cook out my anxiety). We kept our go-bags near the car, and then we kept our go-bags in the car, and then, when it seemed safe, we took them out again. That, and ten days of indoor living and wearing masks when we went out, was all we went through. But we all bear witness. The Foreshadowing It began with a five-year drought that crippled forests and baked plains, followed by an soaking-wet winter and a lush spring that crowded the hillsides with greenery. Summer temperatures hit records several times, and the hills dried out as they always do right before autumn, but this time unusually crowded with parched foliage and growth. The air in Santa Rosa was hot and dry that weekend, an absence of humidity you could snap between your fingers. In the southwest section of the city, where we live, nothing seemed unusual. Like many homes in Santa Rosa our home does not have air conditioning, so for comfort’s sake I grilled our dinner, our 8-foot backyard fence buffering any hint of the winds gathering speed northeast o…

Neutrality is anything but
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2017-08-19T15:22:06Z
subject: Intellectual Freedom
subject: Librarianship
description: “We watch people dragged away and sucker-punched at rallies as they clumsily try to be an early-warning system for what they fear lies ahead.” –Â Unwittingly prophetic me, March, 2016. Sometime after last November, I realized something very strange was happening with my clothes. My slacks had suddenly shrunk, even if I hadn’t washed them. After […]
encoded: “We watch people dragged away and sucker-punched at rallies as they clumsily try to be an early-warning system for what they fear lies ahead.” –Â Unwittingly prophetic me, March, 2016. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-8976" class="wp-image-8976" src="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/320px-Sheet_cake-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="227" height="170" srcset="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/320px-Sheet_cake-300x225.jpg 300w, https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/320px-Sheet_cake.jpg 320w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 227px) 100vw, 227px" /> Sheet cake photo by Flickr user Glane23. CC by 2.0 Sometime after last November, I realized something very strange was happening with my clothes. My slacks had suddenly shrunk, even if I hadn’t washed them. After months of struggling to keep myself buttoned into my clothes, I gave up and purchased slacks and jeans one size larger. I call them my T***p Pants. This post is about two things. It is about the lessons librarians are learning in this frightening era about the nuances and qualifications shadowing our deepest core values–an era so scary that quite a few of us, as Tina Fey observed, have acquired T***p Pants. And it’s also some advice, take it or leave it, on how to “be” in this era. I suspect many librarians have had the same thoughts I have been sharing with a close circle of colleagues. Most librarians take pride in our commitment to free speech. We see ourselves as open to all viewpoints. But in today’s new normal, we have seen that even we have limits. This week, the ACRL Board of Directors put out a statement condemning the violence in Charlottesville. That was the easy part. The Board then stated, “ACRL is unwavering in its long-standing commitment to free exchange of different viewpoints, but what happened in Charlottesville was not that; instead, it was terrorism masquerading as free expression.” You can look at wha…

MPOW in the here and now
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2017-04-09T17:04:49Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I have coined a few biblioneologisms in my day, but the one that has had the longest legs is MPOW (My Place of Work), a convenient, mildly-masking shorthand for one’s institution. For the last four years I haven’t had the bandwidth to coin neologisms, let alone write about MPOW*. This silence could be misconstrued. I […]
encoded: Sometimes we have monsters and UFOs, but for the most part it’s a great place to work I have coined a few biblioneologisms in my day, but the one that has had the longest legs is MPOW (My Place of Work), a convenient, mildly-masking shorthand for one’s institution. For the last four years I haven’t had the bandwidth to coin neologisms, let alone write about MPOW*. This silence could be misconstrued. I love what I do, and I love where I am. I work with a great team on a beautiful campus for a university that is undergoing a lot of good change. We are just wrapping up the first phase of a visioning project to help our large, well-lit building serve its communities well for the decades to come. We’re getting ready to join the other 22 CSU libraries on OneSearch, our first-ever unified library management system. We have brought on some great hires, thrown some great events (the last one featured four Black Panthers talking about their life work — wow!). With a new dean (me) and a changing workforce, we are developing our own personality. It’s all good… and getting better The Library was doing well when I arrived, so my job was to revitalize and switch it up. As noted in one of the few posts about MPOW, the libraries in my system were undergoing their own reassessment, and that has absorbed a fair amount of our attention, but we continue to move forward. Sometimes it’s the little things. You may recall I am unreasonably proud of the automated table of contents I generated for my dissertation, and I also feel that way about MPOW’s slatwall book displays, which in ten areas beautifully market new materials in spaces once occupied by prison-industry bookcases or ugly carpet and unused phones (what were the phones for? Perhaps we will never know). The slatwall was a small project that was a combination of expertise I brought from other libraries, good teamwork at MPOW, and knowing folks. The central problem was answered quickly by an email to a colleague in my doctoral progr…

Questions I have been asked about doctoral programs
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2017-03-29T13:26:26Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: About six months ago I was visiting another institution when someone said to me, “Oh, I used to read your blog, BACK IN THE DAY.” Ah yes, back in the day, that Pleistocene era when I wasn’t working on a PhD while holding down a big job and dealing with the rest of life’s shenanigans. […]
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-8950" src="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/hammer-time-207x300.png" alt="" width="207" height="300" srcset="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/hammer-time-207x300.png 207w, https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/hammer-time.png 294w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 207px) 100vw, 207px" />About six months ago I was visiting another institution when someone said to me, “Oh, I used to read your blog, BACK IN THE DAY.” Ah yes, back in the day, that Pleistocene era when I wasn’t working on a PhD while holding down a big job and dealing with the rest of life’s shenanigans. So now the PhD is done–I watched my committee sign the signature page, two copies of it, even, before we broke out the champers and celebrated–and here I am again. Not blogging every day, as I did once upon a time, but still freer to put virtual pen to electronic paper as the spirit moves me. I have a lot to catch up on–for example, I understand there was an election last fall, and I hear it may not have gone my way–but the first order of business is to address the questions I have had from library folk interested in doctoral programs. Note that my advice is not directed at librarians whose goal is to become faculty in LIS programs. Dropping Back In One popular question comes from people who had dropped out of doctoral programs. Could they ever be accepted into a program again? I’m proof there is a patron saint for second chances. I spent one semester in a doctoral program in 1995 and dropped out for a variety of reasons–wrong time, wrong place, too many life events happening. At the time, I felt that dropping out was the academic equivalent of You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again, but part of higher education is a series of head games, and that was one of them. The second time around, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted from a program and what kind of progr…

A scholar’s pool of tears, Part 2: The pre in preprint means not done yet
type: item
creator: K.G. Schneider
date: 2017-01-10T14:23:57Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Note, for two more days, January 10 and 11, you (as in all of you) have free access to my article, To be real: Antecedents and consequences of sexual identity disclosure by academic library directors. Then it drops behind a paywall and sits there for a year. When I wrote Part 1 of this blog […]
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft wp-image-8940" src="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/nick-ben-jerrys-peanut-butter-half-baked-ice-cream-pint-268x300.jpeg" alt="Half-baked" width="214" height="240" srcset="https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/nick-ben-jerrys-peanut-butter-half-baked-ice-cream-pint-268x300.jpeg 268w, https://freerangelibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/nick-ben-jerrys-peanut-butter-half-baked-ice-cream-pint.jpeg 350w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 214px) 100vw, 214px" />Note, for two more days, January 10 and 11, you (as in all of you) have free access to my article, To be real: Antecedents and consequences of sexual identity disclosure by academic library directors. Then it drops behind a paywall and sits there for a year. When I wrote Part 1 of this blog post in late September, I had keen ambitions of concluding this two-part series by discussing “the intricacies of navigating the liminal world of OA that is not born OA; the OA advocacy happening in my world; and the implications of the publishing environment scholars now work in.” Since then, the world, and my priorities have changed. My goals are to prevent nuclear winter and lead our library to its first significant building upgrades since it opened close to 20 years ago. But at some point I said on Twitter, in response to a conversation about posting preprints, that I would explain why I won’t post a preprint of To be real. And the answer is very simple: because what qualifies as a preprint for Elsevier is a draft of the final product that presents my writing before I incorporated significant stylistic guidance from the second reviewer, and that’s not a version of the article I want people to read. In the pre-Elsevier draft, as noted before, my research is present, but it is overshadowed by clumsy style decisions that Reviewer 2 presented far more politely than the following summary suggests: quotations that were too brief; rush…