explodedlibrary.info

the reason for the path

 There used to be a time when Monday was my biggest blogging night. Well I did do some blogging tonight, over at Libraries Interact.

In that Monday Muse post, I was attempting to be a little more detached - because I was posing questions, rather than just stating my point of view.

Stating my point of view is what I do shamelessly here. For the record, personally I am inspired by the Darien Statements. As some one who doesn’t get to go to a lot of conferences and the like, reading it (as well as being aware of how it was made), was like the distilled essence of a good conference.

At the end of the day, they are just words, and yes, there are often chasms between the words stating our aspirations and how things really are. But still, we need these things, or all we’re left with is the day to day grind or short-term maneuverings. And besides, words are what I work with everyday, I must think they have value.

To use a hiking analogy, it’s a matter of reaching the right balance between paying attention to each step forward (not losing the track, not tripping over rocks or sinking into the mud) and paying attention to the beauty around - whether it be inspiring views of mountains or the wildflowers which are just off the edge of the track. Sometimes the track is very difficult and treacherous, and demands extra attention. But when we stop paying attention to the vista, the reason for the bushwalk disappears - and we may as well be on a treadmill in a gym.

I don’t want my career to be an extended stay at the gym when it could be a challenging bushwalk which takes me somewhere I want to go.

Equinox post, librarians and park rangers

I am aware that I am a walking contradiction. One the one hand, I have a passion for using and consuming online information. On the other hand, I am in love with the natural world. Is there any way of reconciling these things? I started writing this a few days ago, on the day of the autumnal equinox.

Following an incident I tweeted about on the previous weekend, one of my former co-workers and current FaceBook friends joked that I should be a Park Ranger.

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who has daydreamed about working as a ranger. One attraction would be the location: spending extended periods of time in very beautiful places, really getting to know them, experiencing how they change with the seasons. Even more rewarding would be helping to open people’s eyes (especially younger people) to a different way of looking at the natural world. I am aware that the job would have its downsides: rangers also have to do that which could be considered menial and tedious. But then so do librarians some times, and I can live with that, even if I don’t love it.

[Anecdote which prompted me to start thinking about the similarities of librarians and rangers]

... This ranger was able give me information about this place which helped me appreciate where I was and what I was seeing. She gave meaning and context to this place. She reminded me of a good librarian.

I think that the best moments for a librarian are not all that different from a ranger. It’s when we get to see one of our users eyes open to some of the truths of our information-based world. It could be having them see that the library provides access to some amazing stuff and it’s not too difficult to use. It could be a realization that librarians are usually damn good at what they do.

I could look at other parallels between librarians and rangers. Looking specifically at access and navigating our respective spaces, the ranger uses roads and signs and maps and guided walks/activities and good camping/hiking/birding advice. The librarian uses the internet/intranet and the library catalogue and signs and library training and good research advice.

When things go bad, the ranger helps rescue those are lost, applies first aid and enforces the rules which are necessary to preserve natural environment of the protected space. Librarians can untangle the research mess which can trip up people in the library, we can apply emergency treatment to citation lists and are obliged to work within the constraints of copyright law.

The big difference between rangers and librarians is that rangers are custodians of a part of the natural world, and librarians deal with an artificial world, the library.

Traditionally, librarians weren’t just custodians of the library, but we also built it – decided what things would or wouldn’t be in the collection. Now that’s changing. We don’t control our collections as much as we used to. Yes, we still decide what books or journals we need to get in print, but the print collection is only one part of what a library does. I spend most of my time working in our online collections. My library only has limited control of these – beyond the decision to subscribe to a database/package or not, and maybe some basic configuration options – we don’t control these, our vendors do. The online collection also influences the print collection. If we can access text online, be it looseleaf service, journal or law reporter, that will make it less likely that we’ll get it in print. Finally, the library has to deal with resources completely outside its control. Despite our best efforts, we know that people are going to go to Google or Wikipedia first for business research and Australian law graduates usually prefer Austlii over anything in our online collection.

My point is that library resources which librarians have little or no control over are becoming the more important ones. They are the ones which are growing. In that way, our artificial world is becoming more chaotic and organic, closer to the natural world which the ranger deals with.

It’s probably too late for me to change careers to be a park ranger, and to be honest, on most days I’m happy as a librarian in my day job. It’s nice for me to be able to visit the Blue Mountains national park on weekends and just enjoy the place, without any of the responsibilities incumbent on one of its custodians. I imagine that it would be something like that old stereotype of librarians, those people who get to spend their days in a very peaceful place, who are able to read for pleasure all day.

confessions of an information junkie

Really reading anything is such a rare luxury in my work. I make a distinction between reading and skimming text. I sometimes think of myself as an information junkie because I seem to spend most of my day rummaging through texts of all kinds to find the particular information which I need. There is no time to linger, or critically consider an argument. I get what I need, and then I need to move on to find my next hit.

I’ve observed a few things about this state of mind:

• There is no such thing as information overload. It’s just more stuff to deal with. I feel as if I have broken through a certain pain barrier and now feel things differently.
• My favourite thing to do on the computer is press Control F.
• I prefer online text because it is crunchable (analogous to what number crunchers do with numbers) and flexible.
• When I work with print text, and sometimes I must, there are definite rules and processes which must be followed to find information – using indices, charts and tables of contents. Those processes seem at odds with the type of thinking I use when doing my best research of online sources.

The interesting thing is that research is not always like this, and I’m not always like this. Sometimes I need to switch focus, from the macro to the micro. One moment I might be weeding out large numbers of irrelevant cases or articles which were retrieved by my narrow but imperfect search. In the next moment, I need to switch focus onto particular paragraph to see if it’s really saying anything useful about this abstruse legal principle.

I like working in this micro focus, but there doesn’t seem as much need for it on most days. That’s why I’m trying to see the good in the macro focus – being an information junkie.

library phobia

There are people out there how are afraid of libraries and librarians. Most of the time librarians do not see them, because they avoid us if they can. But yesterday I think I met one of them.

She was the personal assistant of one of the higher ups in the firm, and had been asked to find a few books for him. She was quite anxious and very grateful to be helped. She confessed that she had been at the Firm for two years, and hadn’t used the library once – and then braced herself for some disapproving word or look from me.

It struck me because this is somebody who works with some very demanding people on a daily basis, yet she seemed scared of the library. How does this happen?

I’ve worked with librarians who were brilliant researchers, but sometimes had an imperious manner. When I saw this, I hoped I would never act in such a way. It seemed so counter-productive to be intimidating our users like that. But another recent incident has helped me understand how this can happen.

Towards the end of yesterday's evening reference shift, I had a very different interaction. When it finished, I remember thinking, I like this sort of reference question. I like it when the person asking the question has a good grasp of legal research, and has made a really good attempt at finding the answer before coming to me. It means that I can assume that the basics have been covered, so I can focus on the more challenging research techniques, which usually causes my skills to improve. My research skills are not improved when I am going over research basics again and again.

Now I wonder if this is where the dark side starts, when we want our reference questions to be interesting and challenging, and we start putting less value at the less challenging ones. Librarians who do that enough might start sneering at the people who aren’t asking worthy questions.

Of course it’s ok for librarians to want interesting and challenging questions. I learned yesterday that dealing with marginalized library users is its own challenge. Turning these people around, so that they might not be so reluctant to use the library in the future is even more satisfying.

hills and valleys

Yesterday I felt that I was on fire, teaching our new summer clerks about legal and business research. I’ve realized that if I’m not passionate about these subjects, I’m going to be bored by them - so I might as well be passionate. I made a couple of mistakes, and my preparation wasn’t ideal due to a combination of being unwell and the reference desk being extremely busy lately. But I won’t dwell on those negatives. There’s always going to be some flaw and always some room for improvement. Instead I’d like to remember those moments when I felt that the students were engaged and really learning something. And there seemed to be more of those moments than the previous time I did training, so that was really good. I felt more comfortable the more I deviated from the specifics of the lesson plan and did my own thing and used my own examples.

Contrast that with this evening. My late shift finished a while ago, and there’s nobody in the library except for me. My urgent research task involves digging through one of those large recycling bins on wheels. I’m thinking sarcastically, I’m so glad I became a librarian so I could be doing this in my free time!
I’m looking for back issues of the Age newspaper. We only keep the printed newspapers for a month and then they go into the recycling bin. 99% of the time we don’t need them, we rely on our database subscriptions. This evening it was my fortune to fall into that 1% where we needed the print because the solicitor needed to see the ads in those newspapers.
They needed these newspaper ads for a meeting with a client tomorrow morning, so it couldn’t wait until the morning - and if it did, it was likely that this recycling bin would have been emptied overnight.

Tonight I think I reached my limit of what I’m willing to do to answer a reference question. I may dig through a recycling bin of discarded library material, but there’s no way I’d go through the trash. And I’m going to suggest that we get newspaper back issues on microfiche.

first impressions of ALLA 2008

I’ve just returned from the 2008 ALLA conference in Perth.

It was my intention to blog most of the sessions which I attended, but my notes are quite messy and so it will take some time to get them ready. Even after this editing process, I remain a bit diffident about the accuracy and value of these notes, so I’m going to put them in the expodedlibrary bunker, where I sometimes put things which I consider more “iffy”. I’ll be linking to each one from here, so they’ll still be accessible. I’m hoping to add a little value by linking to any books or websites or other linkable things which were referred to.

I won’t be going through my notes in any particular order - just whatever I feel like doing at the time. One will go up tonight, three will go up tomorrow, and then probably one or two each day of next week. If you want to read something right now, Kathryn Greenhill has some brief notes about the sessions she attended on Thursday afternoon.

Anyway, here are my first general impressions of the conference and my trip to Perth.

ALLA was a small and compact conference, with 190 delegates, lasting two days - excluding satellite events and other social activities.

I enjoyed it more than some of the larger conferences I’ve attended recently. I prefer smaller conferences, they’re not quite so overwhelming. You’re more likely to have a chance to have repeated informal chats with people, including the speakers. This was the first ALLA event I’ve attended, and although I noticed that it was close knit, it was not totally intimidating for me as a newcomer. People were generally very welcoming.

There seems to be a real sense of camaraderie amongst law librarians, especially law firm librarians. Could it be because it’s one of the more stressful library jobs, and so it’s nice to find other people who understand what we’re dealing with? Could it be that although from time to time we are on opposing sides of matters, we all face the huge common challenge of dealing with those bloody lawyers ;)

But I don’t want to be snarky. After all, many of the speakers were lawyers and it was gratifying to hear them say very nice things about how they value the law librarians in their organizations. On a related note, one of the themes which popped up in a few of the sessions was the idea that as people who have the tools and skills to find the law more easily than just about anyone else, law librarians have power, and it is our duty to recognize this power and use it responsibly.

My immediate reaction was that I don’t see how this position and ability leads to power, but I’ve noticed that it is the nature of power and privilege that it becomes invisible to its owners. I’m a white male and sometimes I don’t see the privilege attached to being a white male, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. So I’ll try to keep an open mind and think about this some more.

But I digress. The organizing committee of the conference did a great job. The programme was interesting and nicely balanced, and having the new Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia speak was quite a coup! I don’t really have much to say about the trade exhibition. For some people these are the highlight of a conference, but it’s not like that for me. I’m yet to unlock the secret of successfully “working a trade exhibition”, although I did have a couple of good conversations. The social activities went really well, from the opening to the dinner and the closing drinks in the lovely WA Parliament House. The group activity at dinner, making art from discarded library materials, was inspired and turned out to be a great icebreaker.

I only have two gripes. I liked the venue, it was an appropriate size and style for this conference, but I wish it had been more tech friendly. Things like internet access at the podium so speakers could give live demonstrations of things on the web, and power outlets for people with laptops (but kudos for arranging workarounds). I also wish that the conference programme had been purely a single stream, or that it had a complete and equal second stream. I was initially quite miffed that I couldn’t attend the breakout sessions because they were only limited to 20 people and I hadn’t signed up in time. As it turned out, the two sessions I attended instead of the breakout sessions did exceed my expectations, so I’m ok-ish about this thing now.

I also enjoyed the conference because it gave me an opportunity to visit Perth, a city that I really liked. Perth seems to have a nice balance, with the infrastructure and opportunities and diversity one would expect from a large city, while not being as stressed and overloaded as Sydney.

Of course, Perth is the hotspot of Australian librar* blogging, and I was very fortunate to be able to have dinner with the bloggers behind Librarians Matter, Ruminations and Suelibrarian. Although much of blogging is like a conversation, it is nice to occasionally have these interesting conversations face to face.

the rewards of forgetting to have a life

There are times in our lives when we reach a fork in the road, and irrespective of obstacles, we need to decide whether to go in one direction or another. Sometimes these decisions are very easy and are easily forgotten, at other times the decisions are agonizing and can return to haunt us in the future.

Since I’ve been working in the law firm library, I have been confronted with regular reminders of a path not taken. I have a law degree (see my questions and answers post for more details) and my original career plan was to become a lawyer. During my final year of law school, I decided that I didn’t want to be a lawyer* and started looking for alternative things I could do, and eventually decided on librarianship. It’s pointless to re-open that decision not to pursue that career as a lawyer, but I still think it was the right choice for me. However since I’ve started working in this law firm, I’ve had more cause to think about that path not taken.

I recently read an article (Lisa Pryor, The gilded cage, Good weekend magazine, 23 August 2008) which seemed to crystallize the good things and bad things about being a lawyer. Well, to be honest, it looks more at the negatives. I would recommend the whole article, and would be interested in reading the book on which it’s from (Lisa Pryor, The pinstriped prison: How overachievers get trapped in corporate jobs they hate, Picador, 2008). The Gilded Cage [see also Mnemonic’s post quoting from this article] describes a lifestyle which is high-flying and exciting but ultimately unenviable. Work hard and play hard is taken to an extreme. The article describes an interesting paradox, how these young professionals are simultaneously exploited and privileged.

The most interesting paragraph of the article was a retelling of a speech by a NSW Supreme Court judge, the Hon. Justice George Palmer.

Recently a very bright young law graduate got a job with one of the largest and most prestigious firms in town. He couldn’t believe his luck when he was told he was going to work directly for the senior commercial partner. He was even more flattered when the senior partner invited him to his home for dinner to get to know him better. The law graduate arrived at the partner’s palatial Harbour-side residence and was shown around. Eventually they went into the partner’s study. The young man was incredulous to see a Picasso hanging on the wall.

“Gosh, sir,” he blurted out. “That’s a real Picasso, isn’t it? It must have cost an absolute fortune!”

“It certainly did,” replied the partner, putting a paternal hand on the young man’s shoulder . “And if you buckle down to hard work, my boy, put in fifteen to sixteen hours a day six days a week, forget about having a life and give yourself body and soul to the firm, in five years’ time, I’ll be able to buy another one.”

…

There are many lawyers, like the senior commercial partner I told you about, who will tell their impressionable protégés that a successful practice in the law can give you a high standard of living; it can give you kudos amongst your professional colleagues; it can give you a warm glow of satisfaction when you win a case or tie up a successful transaction. They probably won’t add that the warm glow lasts as long as five minutes – if you’re lucky. They won’t say that your legal practice is not a companion and a solace to you when you come home late every night to an empty apartment and you feel that the only way you can get through the silent hours ahead is with a drink – or two, or three, or six.

This is relevant to me as a librarian in a large law firm, because some of the lawyers who ask me to do work are in this situation. It’s good to understand where they’re coming from and know that if they ever snap at me, it’s probably because they’re being shouted at by their superiors.

It’s also relevant to me personally, because it short-circuits those “what if” questions, what if I had become a lawyer etc…** My current job takes me slightly closer back towards that path not taken, and I have a better view of its pros and cons. And I can say for certain that I am happier where I am.

 

* I was able to receive my law degree without paying for up-front tuition fees and so graduated without an immediate debt. I mention this because I know that if I had been educated in the USA, I would have probably had student loans needing to be paid shortly after graduation and I may not have been able to switch careers into something lower paid such as librarianship.

** Of course, I would be making a grave mistake if I were to suggest that working in a large corporate law firm is the only career path for lawyers. This is digressing and off-topic, but I'd guess that less extreme legal careers would have fewer of the downsides.

upcoming visit to Perth for the ALLA conference

[Photo credit: huwp on flickr, Creative Commons License]

I would like to be attending the ALIA conference right now, but at least I have the benefit of Michelle McLean's updates. Unfortunately it would have been difficult to be supported by my work to attend that, so instead I'm attending the ALLA (Australian Law Librarians' Association) conference in Perth on September 18 and 19.

I am thrilled to be visiting Perth. I've never visited WA at all before. I've probably seen more of the USA than I have of Australia. But that's also kind of normal, isn't it – when you're somewhere else, you tend to see more of it, because you don't know if you'll ever be back there again. Whereas with places closer to home, it's easier to blasé about them.

Well I've been interested in visiting WA for some time now. I'm taking off a few more days so I can see more of Perth, and get a glimpse of other parts of that huge state. In particular, I'll be spending some time near Albany and the Stirling Ranges, where I'm hoping to do a lot of hiking. It should also be a good time of year to see some of WA's famous wildflowers.

The conference should be good too. I'll be taking detailed notes of the sessions, so I might as well blog this conference. I've never done conference blogging before, so those posts will be marked with L-plates.

Attending this conference will help me get a much better sense of what it's like to be a law librarian in Australia. Although I've been a law librarian before, most of that was in Minnesota and it wasn't in the law firm environment. I hope in this conference, I'll get a better idea of how to move forward and implement new technologies in this more conservative environment. Some pointers on change management amongst the change resistant. And if that doesn't happen, I'll definitely learn some tricks to improve my reference skillz. ~

one good and one bad thing about my newish job

First with the good.

It can be very exciting.

Some people who don't work in libraries think I have chosen a path of seclusion, where I can escape from the real world in the quiet and calm of the library. But for me in this law firm library, it's not like that all. I don't know if any real working library is such a mythical haven of peace.

The majority of my job is reference work. Every new question - whether it's a phone call or email or somebody approaching the reference desk - is an amazing unknown. It could be from a partner (by refusing to capitalize partner I am rebelling, just a little bit) or a paralegal or from a lawyer or another librarian. It could be in an area I know a lot about and will allow me to test and expand that expertise, or it could be about something I know next to nothing about, in which case I'll learn even more. It could be something challenging and interesting, or kind of dull and tedious. I have been answering reference questions in some shape or form for almost ten years now, and even after all this time, there's a frisson of fear. What if I can't answer the question or find anything useful? What if there's a totally unrealistic deadline? What if the man or woman asking the question is a jerk? Of course, once I get the question, all those thoughts dissipate.

Of course I would prefer that I only received interesting but challenging questions from nice and helpful users with very reasonable deadlines, but it's the random nature of my job which makes it so exciting, and keeps me on my toes.

And now to the bad, which is an excuse for me to have a little rant.

I hesitate to use the word "luddite", but law firms in Australia are extremely conservative when it comes to implementing new technologies - or at least the information sharing technologies I care about. I feel like I've taken a trip back to 2004, when I had just returned to Australia from the US, and nobody was familiar with blogs or RSS, let alone anything as radical as a wiki. A part of this is the fault of the judges.

They're appointed for life, they're not going to lose their jobs if they thumb their noses at the last 30 years of technology like anyone else would. They can do what they like - including insisting that cases used as authorities be photocopied from the hard copy rather than from the legal databases which law firm libraries pay gigabucks for.

The concern is that if I cite a case, let's call it A vs. B, everybody else - the other side, the judge - should be able to look that up and see exactly the same thing. The judges are worried that that if I submit to Court an electronic version of this case, then it would be easy for someone to change the words ever so slightly, so they're in my favour. That would open a terrible can of worms and create this dreadful question mark about the authenticity of materials cited.

The judges don't realise that that question mark is already there. With an image editing programme, I could tamper with a photocopy of a printed case, and change the words, and have it look totally authentic. That cat is already out of the bag. At least with electronic materials, it's easier to do comparisions between different online copies and find any differences in the text. It seems that the NSW judges are particularly conservative when it comes to this sort of thing. I despair of seeing any reform in this area of the law until the Baby Boomer judges have all retired.

The Australian Financial Review decides that it no longer needs librarians

Just in:
Margaret Simons, "Fairfax's business arm shooshes the librarians", Crikey, 9 July 2008

Australian Financial Review and Fairfax Business Media have opted out of a new budgeting system under which they were called on to pay their share of the cost of groupwide services, including IT, accounts and library services. Fairfax Business Media have decided they don't need to pay for the library. [my emphasis]

...

Now, according to Brown's [Deborah Brown, Information Services Manager at Fairfax Media] e-mail, AFR bosses Michael Gill and Glenn Burge have decided that journalists can be "self-service researchers". Yet she says that previously, Business Media reporters have accounted for twenty per cent of the work of the library.

Anybody who cares about the quality of business journalism in Australia, or the role of libraries in media organizations will read this and weep.