Around once
As of this afternoon—after the class of 2010 walks—I’ll be a legit second-year MSLS student. It’s a little odd to think that when I met all those second-years last August, they were no more educated or mature than I now am. I think we new students all assumed that they knew kinda what they were talking about, even though they really didn’t. And this coming August, the tables will have turned.
I’m a bit torn on my reflections of this year.
I have learned so, so much about what it means to be a librarian, and I am outright excited to get a real job somewhere next year. If it weren’t for the ridiculously awesome teaching skills of the faculty here, I’d almost call the classes a waste of time. I’m not sure what precise area I want to go into—I can see myself behind a reference desk just as easily as cataloging full-time—but I’m thrilled that I’m a year closer to whatever it will be.
But at the same time, I’m disillusioned. When I decided to apply to grad schools for library science, I didn’t have a lot of experience at all. I knew that I liked information and how it could be organized and defined, and I knew that I liked helping people learn things, and I knew that I enjoyed knowing a little bit about a lot of things. And, yes, I have found that librarianship is about all those things. But I’ve found even more that librarians tend to live in a shell. We talk about reference interviews and metadata standards and community analysis and information seeking behavior. I concede that all those are important and necessary, but the user gets lost in the mix all too often.
In short, I am dismayed that so many librarians practice their art for the sake of the art itself, not the patron.
See, I try to emphasize end goals. Almost never will I start something without considering the whys, or without carrying those whys to their ultimate reasons. We are lost if we assume that better semantic access, or understanding of visceral needs, or cost-benefit analysis is all that matters. As far as I’m concerned, all of those pale in comparison to individual patrons finding the best information for their true needs as efficiently as possible. Sometimes, better semantic metadata serves that end, but sometimes it doesn’t.
Over the last year, I don’t know how many incarnations of the Pareto Principle—the 80/20 rule, if you will—I’ve been introduced to. Word frequency, journal significance, author productivity: they all seem to be governed by inverse functions. 80% percent of this is accounted for by 20% of that. Over and over and over, it comes up everywhere.
That rule also applies to productivity in any work setting. 80% of results arise from 20% of the effort put in.
If I’ve learned nothing else this year, it’s that 80% of our efficacy as librarians stems from 20% of the work we do. The other 80% of our work serves small populations with relatively insignificant needs.
Don’t take that the wrong way. One of the philosophies I’ve been imbued with is that every patron matters and no need is too small or silly. There are no stupid questions…well, OK, there are very few stupid questions. I don’t mean to imply that we should ditch those patrons who have needs at the margin.
Still, I’m not sure that it’s the best use of our time to focus so heavily on fine-tuning of teeny details. It frustrates me that my time can’t be devoted enough to helping people find information.
<\soapbox>
So what’s cooking for next year? Well, I’ve got a cataloging internship set up from May through December at another university’s library, and I’m registered for three great classes with excellent professors in the fall. I also plan to become more active professionally. I presented my first poster ever on Wednesday, and I might try to work it into a paper. I’m getting involved with IFLA and hopefully will learn a lot as part of the Newspapers section. Events to plan, stuff to write, meetings to hold—I’m busy, and I like it that way.
Still, I’m glad it’s summer and I can take the evenings off.
Here’s to another year.
I notice you didn’t say *which* university your internship is at. Sneaky sneaky. Not willing to deal with the fallout?
Of course there are stupid questions. Think about how much of the internet wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have so many wonderfully stupid questions to laugh at! =D
On a more serious note, I definitely understand how people can so easily get caught up in all the details and techniques of what they are doing, and lose sight of the reason someone came up with all of those in the first place. Sometimes you have to trace down a pretty long line of “why”s, but if you don’t you may end up doing a lot of things that don’t really make sense at all.
It’s the “librarians tend to live in a shell” bit (whether that’s an accurate reflection of professional practice or not) that, I think, is the thing that many of us struggle to address in coursework and beyond. The point, at least in my opinion, is to develop some capacity to look beyond the immediate, day-to-day of the job to consider how and why we do what we do as professionals (which, incidentally, is something your post demonstrates). DFW describes it another (better?) way:
“The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of ‘teaching me how to think’ is supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some ‘critical awareness’ about myself and my certainties…because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded…’Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience…If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important–if you want to operate on your default setting–then you, like me, probably will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you know you have other options…This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t…The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think.” (pp. 33, 53-54, 91-92, 95, 121-122)
In short: keep doin’ what you’re doin’, summer-wise and second-year-wise.
Wallace, David Foster. (2009). This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company.