explodedlibrary.info

unconnected and inspired

As I write this I have no internet connection at home. Of course, I use the internet all day at work, but would never contemplate working on this blog there. Anyway, I’m writing all of this offline, with the intention of uploading it when I’ve got my home connection sorted out.

We take things for granted, and I wonder if this situation of not being able to blog has made me want to blog again. That, and the fact that my daily commute is way shorter than it was than when I lived in Sydney. My guess is that it’s been halved and then halved again.

being the senior librarian

My career has changed recently. I’ve had a management role - only in an acting capacity during a maternity leave absence, but nonetheless I got to experience a lot of the good things and bad things which managers have to deal with. I’ve learned from this experience that I can do this management work, and wouldn’t mind doing it again. The experience also made me appreciate the perks of not being a manager. My new role (I’m not naming my new workplace here, other than to say it’s a Australian government agency) is not a managers role, and I’m really enjoying just having to worry about doing my own job.

But it’s not entirely back to how things were before. I am officially the second in charge of this library, and when my supervisor is away, I am in charge.

It’s a big change for me to be a senior librarian, someone who is responsible for coaching and mentoring less experienced staff. It reminds of two people I’ve worked with before who were more senior than me - one example I’d like to emulate, the other one I’d like to avoid.

I don’t want to be like the senior librarian who would roll her eyes in disdain when asked for assistance or advice with research, because it was all too easy for her. This person was extremely set in her ways, and fought tooth and nail to resist any change or improvement in library services or operations. I don’t want to be like the person who would speak glowingly of all the people who used to work in the library and expound on how better things were before. I don’t want to be the one who was constantly backbiting and undermining her manager. Most importantly, I don’t want to be the senior librarian who made sure that she was always given the most interesting and challenging research queries, and never shared any insights she learned from her research.

But I do want to be the senior librarian who gave rock solid support to the library manager, who could speak for the manager and was usually more approachable, being around more often and slightly less busy. I want to be like the one who would attempt to help me with my problems, even if they weren’t in her area of expertise, helping me identify the next steps and solutions by talking through the problem, and then, gently encourage me to work these things out for myself. I want to be the one who could be open to my crazy ideas about new-fangled library technology, suspend disbelief and tell me what I’d need to do to get these ideas accepted by management. I want to be like the senior librarian who shared her knowledge - whether of research techniques, or of the organization.

Autumn in Canberra

Canberra is an unusual city - most Australians seem to have a hate-love relationship with it. Canberra is both a city and a symbol of the Australian federal government. People complain that it is boring city without a centre and a soul, full of dull government workers.

But since I decided to accept this job and move to Canberra, I’ve had a lot of people say to me - almost as a confession - that they actually like the place - that they enjoy visiting its institutions and restaurants, and have some good friends there.

Canberra supposedly has a crap nightlife, meaning that there are no night clubs or venues worth visiting. I don’t know whether this is true or not, and I don’t really care. I’ve already discovered some good restaurants and bars in Canberra - in Civic, Dickson, Kingston and Manuka. I don’t like night clubs anyway, but enjoy being able to walk around on a Saturday night without being worried about drunken louts, which is an improvement from Sydney.

I like that the Australian Capital Territory is mostly national park, and that the beautiful Namadgi National Park is only a short drive from where I’m living, and that I have another nature reserve just across the street where I’m living. I like that Canberra is full of trees and bike tracks. I visited Canberra a few times when I was growing up, usually in the hot and dry (but not humid) summer or in the chilly winter - chilly by Australian standards. But unlike a lot of places in Australia, Canberra has four distinct seasons. I’m really enjoying the autumn here, the cooler evenings, and the leaves of the deciduous trees turning to gold and red.

It’s different in Sydney. The leaves of deciduous trees tend to stay green well into the autumn, even into the winter, then one day they turn brown and drop all at once. For someone who fell in love with the beautiful and gradual fall colours in Minnesota, this seems so wrong.

But this post isn’t about saying good riddance to Sydney. Sydney is only a shortish drive away (I should know, I’ve done that drive a lot lately), and I know I’ll be back there often - for family reasons as well as to see national and international acts which would never make it to Canberra. I’ll definitely miss the Blue Mountains, a unique place which I won’t be able to visit so often any more. On the other hand, I look forward to exploring some of places surrounding Canberra - Batemans Bay and the South Coast of New South Wales aren’t very far away, not to mention Cooma and Jindabyne and the Snowy Mountains.

One last thing I’ll say about Canberra is that it’s a good place to be a law librarian. There seem to be many opportunities for librarians with legal or business research skills, both in the public sector and private sector. There are some amazing places to aspire to work at if you’re a librarian in Canberra: the National Library of Australia, the Parliament of Australia, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Treasury Department, the High Court Library, to name only a few. If you’re a new librarian and want this to be your focus, you could do a lot worse than move to Canberra. The process for entering the Commonwealth Public Service can be intimidating, but it seems that the placement agencies are having a hard time filling positions, and temping is a good a way of getting experience and getting your foot in the door.

no longer maintaining US permanent residency

One of the posts which has generated a few questions for me is this one from 2005, where I mention returning to the US once a year in order to retain my US permanent residency.

Since I made that post, a couple of things have changed.

Most importantly, there’s updated information from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services about this. It’s not very long, so anybody with a real interest in this topic should read the “Maintaining Permanent Residence” section for themselves. I’ll just point out one thing:

You may be found to have abandoned your permanent resident status if you:
Move to another country intending to live there permanently [my emphasis]

When questions of intention arise in this context, it is not so simple that an immigration officer might ask you what you intend, you tell her/him that you don’t intend to live in the other country permanently, and they just accept your word. No, US Citizenship and Immigration Services determines this intention from your actions.

I have found a few online sources which provide some information about how this intention might be determined. See here, here and here.

The bottom line is that just as it is usually a lot of work and hassle and paperwork to initially obtain a green card, it is not a trivial thing to keep it while while living long term in another country.

This leads me to the other thing which has changed since 2005. Since learning more about the requirements for maintaining permanent residency, I decided that I couldn’t justify doing all these things to keep open the extremely slim possibility that I may one day return to live and work in the US on a long term basis. In my first year back, which was fairly difficult, it was nice to keep that option open. But things have changed, and I feel a lot more at home in Australia. I’ll definitely return to the US as a visitor. Who knows what the future holds, if I wish to work there again, I’d rather take my chances with one of the new E3 Visas for Australians.

Something I’ve learned, both from moving to the US as well as returning to Australia, is that changing countries is not easy - at least for me. In fact it becomes more difficult as you get older. Let’s say that one day I do return to the US for several years, well if that happened, I couldn’t ever see myself moving back to Australia - except for short visits. I don’t feel ready for that.

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.

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. ~

my return to law library land

A lot has happened in the last couple of months. My normal inclination is to write one humungous post where I try to make sense of everything, but I don’t think that such a post will ever be finished - at least not before my life has moved on and I’m thinking about other things.

So here’s one part of it. My new job.

For some reason this job seems totally different, even if it’s not. After all, I’ve worked as a law librarian before - that’s what I did when I first started blogging. Being a law librarian was my initial goal when I decided to become a librarian.

The difference is that my previous law library position was in an academic law library. The majority of my career has been in academic libraries, but this new job is with a big law firm.

In Australia, law firm blogging doesn’t seem to have taken off in the same way that it has in the US. For the time being, I’d rather not mention the particular firm where I work. It’s no dark secret (actually I am really glad to be working for this particular firm), but once I mention that word here, my name and my employers become inextricably linked through Google and other search engines. Later on I may change my mind and provide those details. That’s fine and I’d rather err by being over-cautious in the beginning. After all, if I say everything now, I can’t unsay that later on.

My initial impression is that being a law firm librarian is very different from being an academic law librarian and it’s also different from non-legal special library positions I’ve had.

One big difference from being an academic law librarian, is that in the law firms, information is not meant to be free. It is expensive and it is power and there are some boundaries which it is not permitted to cross.

The most obvious boundary is attorney-client privilege.

Another way that information is constrained are by Chinese Walls, to use the un-PC Australian colloquial term. Other words include firewalls and cones of silence. Whatever you call them, these are used when one firm represents different parties with different interests about something. It would not be a good idea to have information flowing freely between the lawyers representing these different interests.

I’ve noticed another aspect of this information exchange issue. When I receive a research request, I don’t usually receive a whole lot of background or contextual information. It was very different in academic libraries, where I saw reference interviews which resembled interrogations. It is true that more contextual information usually helped the research process.

The more I’ve started to think about this, I wonder if maybe this lack of context is a mercy. After all, it would be quite disturbing for me to to hear detailed information about how my work was facilitating behaviour by individuals or companies which were at odds with my own personal values.

This leads to the next big issue on my mind, which will be the topic of my next post. It is important for me to go to work knowing that I am doing good of some sort in the world. At the very least, I don’t want to be causing harm.

How are these concerns resolved in the law firm environment?

sometimes endings end

I have decided that it's time to re-open the explodedlibrary. I had been blogging for over five years, and have learned that it is not straight forward to just stop it. For one thing, this blog is irrevocably linked with me. Even if I deleted this blog, that would be true. When people search for me, the first thing they find is this blog. With this blog closed, it may appear that I haven't said or done anything or thought about anything since November 2007. Of course that's not true.

My life has changed during the last few months. There were some things going on last year which were making it very difficult to blog. As I wrote in the bunker,

Mergers and acquisitions happen all the time amongst organizations associated with libraries. One's happened to MPOW. Yes, mergers and acquisitions happen all the time, but a merger amongst true equals seems to be extremely rare. There usually is a dominant party and a subordinate party. It has turned out that my place of work is on the losing end of this merger. There is now an integration process underway. Integration after a merger is a strange process. The integration that I'm experiencing means that the subordinate party is completely disintegrated and then parts of it are absorbed into the dominant party and the rest is discarded.

A little over a month after I wrote that, my library had been shut down. I could have had a job in the big university library if I had wanted it, but I decided that it was a good time to move on from that university and looked elsewhere. Fortunately I found something good without too much stress and botheration. It was very painful to go through this merger - the uncertainty and lack of information about the process, the depressing thought that our users would be worse off and there wasn't anything that could be done about it.

A few months later on, I am starting to view this as one of those odd twists which life takes, and as horrible as it was to go through it then, now I can see that it has opened doors which I never would have braved.

So my life has changed. I've had enough of a break from blogging that I feel excited about getting back into it. Not that I'm going to be posting very frequently, probably three posts a month will be a very good month. I'm also working on liberariesinteract.info again, and I expect that my more conventional library posts will be going there.

the writing games

This may have happened when I was in my high school’s badminton team. We were a bunch of friends playing together and badminton was a good excuse to hang out, but we weren’t exactly a great team. I think the only times we ever received any points was when the other side forfeited. One day we booked the gym for some badly needed practice. We showed up and found that there'd been a mixup with the booking and our court had been double-booked with the volleyball team. My badminton team wasn’t exactly super-dedicated, we may have walked away if it wasn’t for the volleyball team’s superior attitude, just assuming we’d defer to them. We ended up both stubbornly playing in the space. The two games shared a similar net and similar sized court - the different sets of lines were already drawn into floor. Having two different games being played on the same court was not an ideal situation. One of my friends had a volleyball pelted into his shoulder. But I guess that it's not nice to be hit on the face with a badminton shuttle or hit on the elbow with a badminton racquet. The joint practice was not a success. After that the two teams generally loathed each other.

This is not a real allegory where every little detail has meaning. The chaotic image of two different games happening in the same space recently came to mind when I was thinking about the relationship between blogging and other writing forms – particularly academic writing and journalism.

No analogy is ideal. This writing as a game analogy may suggest that writing is a trivial activity, that it's just a game. But I think games are important microcosms of reality. Each game has its own distinct ways of winning and losing and participation. The different games require different skills and attract different sorts of players. Some people play to win, others do it for the money, some just like to show off their skills. Some people play simply to have fun or because the game is a group activity and they like the camaraderie with the other players.

Each game regards itself as more important and interesting than the other games. Often the players of one game may have a negative view of the other games. For example, a blogger may view academic writing as anachronistic and elitist. An academic writer may view blogging as a meaningless low-brow game or a hideously bastardized version of their own game.

One way of looking at these different forms of writing is to be relativistic – each of these games serves different functions and attracts different sorts of people. Actually I’d better stop right now. In the next part of this post ["why I choose blogging", written on 15 August 2007], I’ll explore the non-relativistic path.