“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” wrote George Orwell in Animal Farm.
As I embark on the tall task of taking a complete inventory of our print collection (between 75 – 80 K volumes) with our staff of two over our two month summer without students on campus (our summer courses are online only), I find myself modifying this famous line as I think about the fact that we will be weeding over the next few years (and are pulling some of the really bad stuff now as we go).
Some books are more equal than others.
All of our libraries are facing space issues as we shift from print collections to digital and there is more demand on our campuses for office space, collaborative group space, and technology. What is it that justifies a book maintaining space on our shelves? What makes us add a book to the collection? How many copies of a title is enough? Too many? Why do donors to the library seem to think that we want their personal collections of books? (some of which don’t fit our mission, collection development strategy, or support our curricula).
How do we navigate this slippery slope of questions and concerns?
Just a few things crossing my mind as I wait for the scanner to recharge… Any tips/tricks/advice are welcome.
Signed,
Scanning Away the Summer,
Inventory Collecting Librarian
Organizational Fit, Banned or Expand?
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are hot topics right now in our profession, but perhaps it’s not just about hiring practices. To be sure, that is a good starting point, and for more than a half-century the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has monitored this. “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex and also made it illegal to retaliate against those who sought relief or assisted others in their exercise of rights secured by the law” (https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/history/cra50th/).
Since the Civil Rights Act there have been other laws enacted such as Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). But even if we say we are an equal opportunity employer in hiring advertising, a commitment to DEI obligates us to look at even our everyday activities with a critical eye.
Photo credit: Andrew Gray [CC BY-SA 3.0].
We shouldn’t however just talk about axing the concept of fitness, because it’s too easy to simply say we’re against discrimination and wash our hands of it. Plus, today libraries are looking for ways to promote their value and distinctiveness and so we cannot abandon what makes them unique. Therefore, maybe we can simply grow our understanding of organizational fit with an attentiveness to DEI. One way to do this would be to establish DEI alongside other core values, so that questions of fitness are not just discussed as something to be drummed out of hiring.
An illustrative macro-level question is to ask how can we have an affirmative and a colorblind society? To celebrate pluralism and multiculturalism the metaphor was shifted from that of a melting pot to a salad. Whatever your stance, join or start a conversation in your library on whether organizational fit should expand, or be banned.
“Mapping Your Journey: Steps for Beginning a Library Diversity Residency or Fellowship” Summary
“Mapping Your Journey: Steps for Beginning a Library Diversity Residency or Fellowship” was presented by Amanda Leftwich on March 18, 2019, for the PaLA Connect and Communicate Series. Leftwich is the Online Learning Librarian and Diversity Fellow at Montgomery County Community College (often referred to as “Montco” or “MC3”) in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. She started her position in August 2018. Her presentation begins by discussing the confusion with the terms “resident” or “fellow,” and how this can be misinterpreted as meaning that the person is serving as an intern. Quite the contrary, a resident or fellow is a professional who has recently obtained his or her MLS/MSLS, MLIS/MSLIS, or MIS, and who generally has less than three to five years of post-graduate professional experience. It is this desire to accrue more experience and to try different avenues which often encourages recent library graduates to apply for diversity and fellowship positions. These positions are temporary in status, typically ranging from one to three years, and can be tenure track. (At Montco, the positions usually last a year, although Leftwich’s particular fellowship has a two academic year duration.)
In 2008, Montco started its own Faculty Diversity Fellowship program to promote diversity, providing mentoring to minority scholars in the early stages of their careers to allow them to develop their teaching skills as they continue to work on or complete their terminal-level degrees. Faculty fellows receive mentoring from colleagues, and in return, these fellows participate as mentors in Montco’s Minority Student Mentoring Initiative (MSMI). Leftwich’s two-year fellowship is the only one of its nature in the cohort due to the ACRL Alliance agreement. She hopes that when the fellowship ends, she will be hired back as a permanent, full-time, non-teaching faculty. Her responsibilities include focusing on diversifying the collections, instruction and reference rotations (which include serving as an embedded librarian), committee work, and displays.
As with any new professional experience, Leftwich walked into her fellowship position with expectations, including knowing her coordinators’ meetings, scheduling rotations, having a designated set of responsibilities for the position, securing a mentor from within the department, creating goals and frameworks for the fellowship, and having no committee work. With a good chuckle, Leftwich explains that she did not know what this fellowship position would entail; she just signed her contract, departed from her previous employer, and entered the experience at Montco with an open mind and high hopes. As it turns out, the reality of her fellowship differed greatly from her expectations. There are no coordinators and the staff is too small for rotations. As for what is expected of Leftwich in her fellowship, she has been instructed to do what interests her, and responsibilities are not set in this particular environment. Similarly, there are no set goals or frameworks for her duration at Montco. Her mentor is from the Geography department instead of from within the library. And she has found that per her contract, she is required to serve on a committee.
Leftwich encourages those in a fellowship to ask the following questions about their journeys: What do you hope to gain from a residency? Are you looking for more reference or instructional experience? How will this position help you in the future? Is it worth the commitment? Have a clear definition of what your life will be like after this residency concludes because it will not be a permanent situation. Are you willing to be a mentor? Are you willing to be a part of a diversity initiative set by the institution? Are you willing to follow the goals and mission of the institution?
Be prepared to make your goals. Reflect and track your own work, including all work activities and accomplishments. Find a mentor or two, preferably someone outside of your department. Be a mentor. Get involved, both within your department and outside of it as well. Be flexible, but not to the point where you are a pushover. Ask questions at all stages of your residency.
Nothing is ever without its challenges and negatives, and a residency is not all “grins and giggles.” Leftwich also presents the challenges of her residency at Montco. For starters, she is the only fellow in her department. This means working alone on projects and initiatives without receiving feedback from someone on her professional level. She has no official coordinator and therefore must report to the dean. Again, she has no specified mentor, but she has found solace and support with her co-workers, in particular, the information literacy librarian. There is no communication about the fellowship position’s requirements or needs, so it does require discipline and structure to come up with your own framework of how you want this residency to play out and what you hope to gain from it. And while this may not seem like a challenge, Leftwich does find herself on some days with a lot of free time. She advises that you will need to structure your own day; you cannot wait to have it structured for you by your co-workers or deans. Leftwich also notes that there is no “publish or perish” culture on campus, although she does enjoy researching and writing. Since there is not a requirement among faculty to publish, there is no internal promotion of her writing when she does do it, and no one keeps track of it, except for Leftwich herself. This poses a challenge in that you want to be prepared should you go from a non-“publish or perish” culture to one that requires regular submissions for publication. Share your research externally, Leftwich advises.
Despite these challenges, Leftwich ends on a positive note, stating that you should take the opportunity to soak it in all and gain valuable experience from your residency. Remember to relax and enjoy the adventure!
You may view Leftwich’s presentation on YouTube.
Spring 2019 issue of PaLRaP available!
The latest issue of Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice is now available at palrap.org!
Articles include:
- In the PaLRaP Spotlight: Patrick Spero
- Getting Your Collection Ready for the Centennial Anniversaries of the 19th Amendment
- What Pennsylvania Public Libraries Want: An Analysis of PAMAILALL Job Advertisements
- What Do High School Students Know About Information Literacy?
- Just One More Thing: Getting the Most Out of One-Minute Papers
- PaLA Virtual Journal Club: Providing Opportunities for Reflection, Improvement, and Connections
- Building Capital at the Library: Financial Literacy Programming and Partnerships
- News Briefs from PA Libraries
Tom Reinsfelder & Larissa Gordon, Co-Editors
===========================================================================
Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice (PaLRaP) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, sponsored by the College and Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association. PaLRaP provides an opportunity for librarians in Pennsylvania to share their knowledge and experience with practicing librarians across Pennsylvania and beyond. The journal includes articles from all areas of librarianship, and from all types of libraries within Pennsylvania.
A Technological Dream; or, If We Only Knew
I recently took the time to perform a once venerated rite of library research. When no one was looking, I browsed several books roughly adjacent to each other on a shelf in the stacks. Then, feeling emboldened, I pulled books from the row, turned to their indexes, skimmed them for relevant entries, and, in most cases, returned the book to the shelf and pushed onward as if a better title might actually be lurking down the range. Occasionally, perhaps with every 3rd or 4th volume, I found something in the index that led me to turn to the listed pages themselves. There—on page 37 or 377—I actually read.
I do not share this anecdote for purely nostalgic or romantic purposes. Nor do I want to sanctimoniously declare—see! we can still compare, analyze, evaluate, and otherwise think critically with actual books in our hands. Finally, I am not about to make the case for keeping books on the shelf when we are otherwise tempted, or ordered, to send them by the truckload to offsite storage.
My motive is actually technological in nature. It occurred to me after my recent foray into the stacks, as it has from time to time over the years, that librarians really have no idea how many times a book has been pulled from the shelf. We can measure its “circulation”—a term that suggest a broadness it does not really describe—with checkout numbers and even, if we have or take the time, by enumerating in the system when it is found on the “Please Do Not Reshelve Books” shelf. This last, the place we want students and faculty to place books they survey, but ultimately reject, is, I would argue, the most deceptive and treacherous location in the library. Perhaps one tenth of all books inspected in the stacks ever make it to the library limbo of a Do Not Reshelve shelf. We know this when we discover that yesterday’s row of flush spines are suddenly displaced like a bad set of teeth. We know it when we shelf read and utter curses under our breath that only Melvil Dewey can hear. If any of this rings true, if it is familiar and equally frustrating for you, I would like to propose a solution—the technological part of my now overlong windup to the point. I want to see “smart shelves” in every library.
Why couldn’t a sensor run the length of every shelf and detect the movement of any book on the shelf below it? Why couldn’t this be a fairly affordable system to build and install? Why couldn’t such a shelf easily integrate with an ILS to vastly improve our understanding of just how, and how often, books get used in the library?
I should say I have no idea how to actually design or manufacture a smart shelf; my technical skills will never reach such rarified air. But surely someone somewhere can do this. It is just one of many practical library tools that we could use to better understand how our users behave and how we might better serve them.
The next time my library debates what new ILS upgrade to make, or what CMS to transfer collections to, or wonders if we are subscribing to the best databases for the money, I think I will consider the smart shelf instead. Or, I will imagine an app, or device, or digital tool that might actually help us solve one of the old problems we never seem to overcome. Of course, none of these things may ever come to be. But isn’t there some solace in an elegant solution, even if it doesn’t actually exist.
It's Academic 
![Andrew Gray [CC BY-SA 3.0]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jellybeans_in_cupped_hands.jpg){kind=link}