i'm so hip, i have difficulty seeing over my pelvis*

I've been thinking about this Annoyed Librarian column on young, "hip" (not a fan of this word) librarians and hiring practices. And as usual with the AL, I see her point but I don't quite agree.

(I do agree with her initial assertion that the idea that young librarians are taking over anything right at this particular economic moment is laughable. Several of us on this blog have eked out good library jobs, after a LOT of blood, sweat and tears, but I think we have a while before we're really in position for the true world domination we deserve.)

But I think it's naive to think that youthfulness and "hipness" (not a fan of that word) aren't factors in hiring decisions.

EVERYthing is a factor in hiring decisions.

Let's take this:

But my advice to her and all the other young hip librarians is to tone it down a bit if you want to get jobs and succeed as librarians. Really, no one cares if you’re young or hip, as should be obvious by the sorts of people libraries hire. Nobody even cares how you look...

Just being young and hip in itself means nothing. People respect you if you’re smart and do your job well. If you’re dumb or suck at your job, don’t blame tattoo-less, oldster librarians for disliking or firing you.

When you walk into the door of an interview room, being young (let's leave "hip" aside for the moment) means a lot. As an interviewee, you probably don't know what it means. In a library with lots of other young people, or one looking for fresh blood and new ideas, or one that wants to improve its social media profile -- being young could be in your favor. But it could work against you, seriously against you, in a place that is skeptical of our generation of librarians for any number of perceptions. Not knowing traditional skills like cataloging, not having a lot of experience, not understanding the way the library world works, "coming on too strong" with too many new and crazy ideas about changing the way things work... all of that could turn someone against young candidates before they even open their mouths.

Here's another one:

Self-proclaimed hipsters are concerned with style, but most librarians are concerned with substance. Pretty much any style is fine as long as the substance is there, and if the substance isn’t there, no amount of style will help.

Sure, everyone is concerned with substance, but it's really hard to convey and/or truly perceive substance during a first interview. I've been on both sides of the hiring process, and they both suck, and you have to really think hard about your own conceptions and biases. Hiring managers DO care how you look, because how you look gives clues to how you'd behave in the job. (And sometimes people in charge of creating a diverse workplace are specifically supposed to care about the color of your skin or your gender or your age, too.)

Also, self-proclaimed hipsters like the one quoted in the article? They want jobs too. They're thinking about how to market themselves and how to get themselves hired in the best place they can. I can be as annoyed at hipsters as anyone, but it makes no sense to argue that youth -- and maybe hipsterness, and maybe being tall or having glasses, and maybe having tattoos or not having tattoos -- has no impact at all on whether you get hired. Everything has an impact.

---

*Zaphod Beeblebrox, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes.

Book Club from Hell

I just spoke to a friend of mine who attends a church in Brooklyn. There is a small group of people who meet there and have a book club.

Last night an addict wandered in during their meeting saying he wanted to talk to the pastor, who was also part of the book discussion. The man attempted to take over the meeting and on his third attempt snapped, grabbed a girl with her back to him, put her in a headlock and started yelling. He appeared to have a knife to her throat.

My friend's girlfriend ran up to the parsonage to notify the other pastor and have her call 911. The attacker began yelling at my friend to "get that girl back in here," which gave my friend a chance to get to the door and leave. The pastor, attacker, hostage and hostage's husband remained inside.

The attacker was eventually appeased by some money and left the church. The hostage suffered only a nick to her ear; the believed knife turned out to be a pen.

They didn't catch the suspect but did file a police report and look through mugshots. They also drove around the neighborhood seeing if they could locate him.

This story made me stop and think about all of our library jobs. We are not unlike that church because we provide space to meet. Oftentimes meetings are at night, sometimes even after operating hours. Most librarians are female and we often work alone or in small numbers (thanks budget cuts).

Obviously we can't just start bringing guns to work, but we should have training about what to do in an emergency and self-defense. It probably wouldn't hurt to be trained about how to deal with hostile or chemically altered people, too.

I'm not sure how I would've reacted, but there's a good chance I would've gotten stabbed by an inkpen and then cried myself to sleep that night. I'm so glad my friends are safe.

Recycling

Remember all those projects you worked on in library school? PowerPoint presentations and projects with their tables, bullet points and random images can still be used.

As the Reference Librarian at my public library I am in charge of teaching computer classes. As I polished up my presentation (I get to play with Smart Board software, clunky building material but so much fun in class) for Word Basics I wanted to really have a good practice session at the end of class. As much as you can have class open a document and start fiddlin' around, you spend time waiting for them to create enough material to rearrange and play with Word. On the other hand, I have files sitting around from grad school with bullets and numbering, tables and clip art. So I went through and found one assignment that was short (5 pages) but with a variety of things for them to delete, reformat and basically mangle.

Unfortunately I can't report on whether or not this worked well, snow came and there was no Word Basic class......

I am totally ready for PowerPoint Basics though and I hope they have fun with my ppt on Snowflake Classification.

Booktalk: The Devotion of Suspect X

I was recently given an advance copy of this book to read and review.  I was excited because it had won the Naoki Sanjugo Prize, which is roughly Japan’s version of the National Book Award.  It has also been turned into a blockbuster movie in Japan (less exciting- I know what Japanese domestic movie hits usually are).  Then I learned it was a mystery.   Now, I don’t usually read mysteries, or at least mysteries for adults.   I used to love Trixie Beldon, The Boxcar Children, and Encyclopedia Brown.  Those, however, are much different than mysteries written for people over the age of twelve.  As such, I started this book with the assumption I would hate it and that I would spend half the time angry at not being able to solve the case.  This didn’t happen.   Instead, I read it in one go (real review now!):

Keigo Higashino’s 容疑者Xの献身/Yoshiga X No Kenshin/The Devotion of Suspect X  (trans. Alexander O. Smith) revolves around a single housewife, her daughter, the mathematician who lives next door, a physics genius, several well-meaning cops, and the housewife’s estranged, and now dead, ex-husband.  Higashino’s use of multiple narrators leaves the reader believing they know the whole story almost from the very beginning, but the perspectives ignored are just important as those fleshed out.   Personally, I enjoyed the multiple perspectives the story is told from and the fact that much time is spent teasing the detectives assigned to the case, but found Yasuko (the housewife) a bit stereotyped.   If you like mysteries, Higashino’s work is worth a look—he was nominated for the Naoki Sanjugo Prize five times previous to winning with this book. 

If you want to read this, it comes out in February.  If you can’t wait and are linguistically skilled, it’s available now in the original Japanese, and is widely available from Amazon.jp, where I may have found the cover image.

A Few Words on Winter Weather

I work in a small rural library system tucked in the Appalachians. This has been an especially difficult winter and has opened my eyes to the challenges that weather can create for a public library. I was spoiled in Syracuse because they city is prepared for mountains of snow and their infrastructure is trained to provide and pay for plowing and salt. However, in my new location the harsh winters are not the norm (thanks, Global Warming) and I think they are unsure about how much money and resources to plan for.

There are many things to take into consideration and I'd love to hear how other libraries handle inclement weather. I think most considerations fall into two categories: staff and service.

Consider your staff's geography.
While my library is located on a main street that receives regular plow attention, most of our employees live "over the mountain" in areas that receive much more snowfall and much less maintenance. Additionally, our branches are in rural areas of the county that get hit harder by snow and ice.

Consider your staff's age.
There's a lot of talk about the graying of the library profession. In my library system most employees are over the age of 40 and a large portion of them are in their 50s/60s. I am terrified that they will fall and hurt themselves in bad weather, especially because our parking lot is a sloppy nightmare. We have enough issues with gout, fatigue and ongoing diseases like cancer that I am convinced we're tempting fate whenever we're open in an ice storm. It sounds dramatic, but I feel like their blood will be on our hands!

Consider your staff's resources.
Most of my library administrators drive SUVs, which is a luxury that many cannot afford. Sure, I can make it in because I have a four wheel drive Subaru, but it's not as easy for someone driving a 1995 Ford Escort. Also, our policies are complex in regards to using leave time due to weather, so many employees can lose time and money if they can't make it in versus no loss of time if the library is officially closed.

Consider your service goals.
Library's function to support their communities. If a library feels strongly that they should be open come Hell or high water, then so be it. However, if a library is open in a community where everyone stays inside on cloudy days, it may be a wiser use of resources to close. It can be frustrating for staff to risk their lives to come in and then have two patrons in an entire day.

Consider your service resources.
Municipal resources are dwindling, which includes money for salt, plowing, and general budgets. We've all read about the cutbacks and closings impacting libraries across the nation. Should a library be open in a blizzard if they can't afford to plow or salt the parking lot? There can also be issues where a library is both autonomous but also a government agency; my director can choose to remain open when other county agencies are closed, which I think muddies the waters in several areas.

I'm not saying that a library should close every time a flake falls, but I also think it's not unreasonable to find a balance between providing great service and expecting your employees to have a sleigh and reindeer to get them to work.

Thoughts?

Working Girl

I would like to apologize for the lack of posts from me recently. I've contributed a number of Book Talks, but I would really like to discuss librarianship more.

Things are busy at work right now and I've been using that as an excuse for my absence. I realize that being a librarian means keeping countless balls in the air simultaneously and I definitely envy those who can work and contribute to other things like blogs and Twitter feeds with real content and not just sporadic musings about pop culture.

That being said, here at least is a list of current projects that I hope to talk about later:

• Branch renovation and moving of its collection
• Policy and procedure revisions
• NEA grant-sponsored project via partnership with two other county organizations
• Personnel supervision
• Communication with staff in regards to inclement weather
• Social events in the work place

It's always an adventure in library-land; some days you're the windshield and some days you're the bug!

Book Talk: The Big Short

The Big Short by Michael Lewis chronicles the roots and full bloom of the recent financial crisis based on the subprime mortgage market failure. It's still unbelievable that this even happened and that the American public got so little explanation and so few answers. To read this book is to stand amazed as democracy and hope burn to the ground; to read this book is to become enraged all over again at the antics of Wall Street and the failure and impotent actions of the government to address the real issues. I found myself shaking my head and gasping in sheer disbelief. Lewis's writing is amazingly understandable and I enjoyed the depth of his research and all his footnotes. I think I'm going to read some of his research documents if I can find them.

On a side note, I briefly worked with/for both Bank of America (slash Merrill Lynch) and UBS during the time frame of this book. I was a contracted partner with a separate corporation, but I still remember the feeling of unease as all of this started happening. I didn't realize what was going on at the time though I realize now that know one really knew, and maybe never will.