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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.

different ways of dealing with obstacles

A few months back I went on a short walk to see Terrace Falls in the Blue Mountains. I wanted to try some different tracks in the area, a wish which led me to a track which was little better than a kangaroo pad along a steep hillside. Maybe it was once a good track and has slowly been going back to nature. Then there were all the fallen trees in my way. After scrambling over the third or fourth such obstacle in the space of fifteen minutes, I started thinking about we deal with obstacles on the path - and in work and life.

These are just six responses, I'm sure there are more ways than this, but this is all that came to me at the time. In no particular order:

- Climb over the obstacle or go under it. There are some problems which can be fixed if  enough people dedicate sufficient time and effort to solving the solution. This seems like climbing over the obstacle. There are other obstacles which appear imposing at first, but when analyzed calmly, it's easy enough to find a good and non-disruptive workaround, which could be liked to squeezing under the obstacle.

- Leave the track and go around the obstacle. Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to take an unorthodox approach that is not in the procedures book. The danger is when you have to depart too far from the track. If you're not careful about returning to the track as soon as possible, you may get lost. Last year I helped somebody who had been lost in Sassafras Gully for seven hours, because he had wandered from the track in dense and confusing terrain, got lost and panicked. Sometimes the danger is not so much the possibility of getting lost, but dealing with hazardous terrain, as depicted in the photo.

- Go through the obstacle. Imagine your obstacle is a deep muddy bog. There have been times I've been able to pick a way through the bog without sinking in. This approach calls for extremely good observation of what you can get away with. Walking on mud without sinking in also demands particular delicacy, but if the obstacle is a mass of leaves and branches from a fallen tree, brute force and tenacity help. This approach can be risky, and it's advisable to have a Plan B. What happens if you do sink into the mud? Sometimes I've tried this approach with office politics, wanting to stay above it - sometimes being successful, sometimes not.

- Remove the obstacle. This can be the heroic option. Not only are you dealing with the obstacle, but you're making sure that nobody else has to. It's easy to do with little obstacles, but larger obstacles require something extra, be it strength or a chainsaw. There are sometimes unforeseen consequences to this. You might remove the obstacle from your path and it throw into somebody else's path or cause some environmental damage. Last week I was walking in Dante's Glen near Lawson and came across some track maintenance workers clearing fallen trees from the path. I was grateful for what they were doing, but I happened to be there when they rolled a huge trunk section off the track. It crushed several small trees and ferns on its way down the gully. I can't help but wonder if there had been a better way.

- Turn back and choose a different path. In the Blue Mountains there are plenty of tracks which look promising in the beginning but then deteriorate into animal pads leading nowhere. Some people turn back too soon, because the ideas of facing any obstacles is too scary. Other people are very reluctant to turn around ever. It seems like admitting defeat, that the initial decision to take this path was wrong. But after facing a huge and seemingly insurmountable obstacle or a depressing series of smaller annoying obstacles, it's worth asking the question if this path is still the right one. This could be the situation when somebody decides to leave a relationship or a job. Once you know that you are on the wrong path, it's better to cut your losses and turn around immediately. This can be quite disheartening, but hopefully the lessons learned from this wrong turn will be helpful in the future

Any of the above five approaches are fundamentally valid, they could be the best approach depending on the person or the circumstances. There's one other response I'd like to mention. This is how it goes: If you reach the obstacle, close your eyes. Close your eyes and try not to think about whatever the obstacle is. After a while - seconds, minutes, or even years later - open your eyes again, hoping that the obstacle has disappeared. If that didn't happen, just repeat and try again until the obstacle does disappear. The hope is that if you try hard enough at ignoring the obstacle, the better the chances of it going away. No, it's not a very effective method, but I'm mentioning it because it's very popular with libraries who don't like how their users have changed lately.

winter pause

Winter has finally come to the Blue Mountains and I'm glad for it. After almost of a week of rain, Sassafras Gully should be closer to the temperate rain forest that it is meant to be. I am looking forward to seeing its waterfalls cascading at more than a sad trickle.

I have a new blog-related project which I'm working on and is consuming most of my creative energy at this point. I've decided to give it the attention that it needs, even if it means putting this blog on a hiatus for a little while. Not that the explodedlibrary will be totally neglected. In the next month or so, I will be playing with aspects of the blog's design.

Currently playing in iTunes: Common People by William Shatner

short trip to Maria Island

We have a long weekend in Tasmania - Monday is a holiday for the Queen's Birthday. No, it's not the Queen's real birthday, just when Tasmanians celebrate it. Every state has a different day. Don't ask me why and don't ask me to make sense of this.

It is very nice to have a paid holiday again!

I am unexpectedly going to be visiting one of my favourite places in the whole world over the three day weekend - Maria Island (pronounced Mariah).

The whole place is a national park. There are no cars - you have to travel in a small boat for aboat an hour. I'm going to be sleeping in some well-preserved convict buildings - the old penetentiary from the early 1800s. There are beautiful and deserted beaches on one side of the island and amazing cliffs on the other side. There are lots of wallabies, a few kangaroos and emus and other interesting Australian animals. The island is very undeveloped. I'll hopefully post a few photos of my trip when I get back.

barkfall - why are there four seasons?

Depending on how you look at it, Tasmania may have the typical four distinct seasons. At least this description is less artificial when applied to Tasmania than to other places in Australia. For example, the leaves of the European deciduous trees which have been planted on the island do turn gold or red before starting to fall. The leaves of deciduous trees in Sydney just seemed to suddenly turn brown and then drop onto ground, all at once. The further north you go, the less sense that four seasons seem to make in Australia – until you get to the tropical areas which only have the two seasons – wet and dry.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to people from the Northern Hemisphere who are convinced that Tasmania doesn’t have four seasons, but only one – which is spring, because it never gets too hot or too cold over here. It’s true that the seasons here are more subtle. The leaves on almost all of the native plants look the same whether it’s summer or winter. There can be snow and freezing weather on the mountains in summer. Yes, summer is usually warmer than spring which is warmer than winter, but the degrees of temperature difference between the seasons are minute when compared with a continental climate like Minnesota.

It never ceased to amaze me how place that gets so cold in the winter as Minnesota, could be so hot and humid in the summer. It would dismay me how short (although delightful) spring and autumn could be there. One day in October it might be 65F and then only a few days later it would be 30F.

As I’ve been pondering whether the four seasons template works everywhere, I’ve been thinking that Minnesota really has five seasons, because it gets a second helping of winter. I’m talking about the dreary time of year when the snowbanks start to melt, the days are a bit longer, but any day there might be a nasty snowstorm and the flowers and greenery of spring seem a long way off. I’m basically talking about mid-February through to mid-April.

Of course, the extreme weather keeps away the bad people. Why didn’t anybody mention that to Arlon Lindner? Well if thinking such things helps Minnesotans get through the month of March, I won’t be so cruel as to argue with them.

I remember hearing something on ABC radio about how most places in Australia can’t really fit into four seasons. In some places there might be six seasons, admittedly fairly subtle.

Although eucalyptus leaves don’t fall at once, I have noticed that eucalyptus trees in Tasmania begin to shed their bark in late February. It’s very pretty actually, the ground is littered with the freshly fallen bark, often colourful on the underside. The new bark on the tree trunks and branches looks light, soft and clean – it hasn’t yet been sunburnt or weathered the many fierce storms in store for it.

Could this be a subtle sign-post for the start of a new season? I wonder that other ones there might be.