Being Thankful: A Year in the Trenches

Many of you who follow my blog know that I have been out of work since March of this year. It has been a year …! I could fill in those dots with so many words – some good, some bad, some happy, some painful. I can certainly say it has been an experience; one that has taught me much about myself, my profession, and my aspirations for the future.

Losing a job that you liked and where you felt you were making a contribution is difficult. Being let go is something that happened to others. I never thought it would happen to me. In the immediate days afterward, I was numb, shocked, angry, confused. Fortunately, I had good support from my family and from colleagues across the world – some who I know well, and others who I’ve met only a few times.

Over the past nine months I have had a great deal of time to reflect, learn, and hopefully grow personally and professionally. Here are a few things I learned and am continuing to learn.

•  I really do love the library profession and am not ready to retire or ride off into the sunset. I remain fully engaged with the profession and still feel that I have much to contribute.
•  My sense of self-worth, personally and professionally, is not based on what others think of me.
•  Having spent all of my life, since age 5, within the rhythm of the school year, this year has been odd. I miss the academic schedule. It is my inner biorhythm.
• I have always thought of myself as a life-long learner, and fortunately, even with a different schedule, I find that I still learn something new almost every day.
•  More than ever I am committed to being a global citizen. I want everyone to move past the nationalist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic rhetoric and embrace the world and its people. We really do need each other.
• For years I have been a huge audiobook fan, and, with extra time, I find that I am listening to even more – 135 books since March. (Thank you, Los Angeles Public Library). 
•  While there is a lot of public bashing of higher education today, I think that this is a wonderful, although challenging time to be in higher education. As a first-generation college student, whose parents did not get to attend high school, I can testify that an education makes a difference in your outlook, your ability to think, your ability to be a global citizen, and of course it helps the job prospects too. I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to earn four degrees and spend my entire career so far in higher education.
• Colleagues in the library and information spaces are wonderful and caring individuals who not only are supportive of each other but are committed to social justice and those who are marginalized by society.

As we head into the Thanksgiving season, it is time to reflect on the things that I am thankful for.

•  A mother who introduced me to libraries
•  A 95-year-old father, Canadian Second World War veteran; still going strong
•  A wife who received a liver transplant on January 1, 2018, and is still here with us. Also thankful for organ donors, especially the donor for my wife.
•  Seven adult children; all doing reasonably well.
•  A sister and brother-in-law who have had my back during this year.
• A large network of library colleagues and friends who have been very, very supportive and encouraging during this year.
• The opportunity to be reflective, to write, and grow during a personally difficult time.
• A profession that I believe makes a positive difference for millions of people in this country and around the world.

 With such a year, it might, to some, seem odd for me to post on being thankful. Being thankful is both hopeful and cathartic; it expresses where I have been and where I hope to go. One of the points I talk about in any “job talk/interview presentation” is the phrase “living the story”.  This comes from the idea that we all tell stories to ourselves and these stories either constrain us or liberate us. For me, “living the story”, is a liberating one that expresses the desired future story, that we tell ourselves over and over until it becomes our true story.

The title of this post is intentional and references both my own experience as well as the end of the Great War (World War I) whose 100^th anniversary we celebrated this year. While my experience in no way compares to the hell of the trenches, each person, sometimes in life, is likely to experience their own “trench” or ”dark night of the soul”. One method of dealing with difficult times is to write, and for me, this blog was one way to express myself and to nurture my professional identity which had been attacked. For others, especially during World War I, poetry was a common form of expression; a way to express anger, sorrow, and hope.

I first discovered the “war poets” about ten years ago and was impressed by the way these poets, mainly British, always active soldiers, used poetry to deal with the hell of war and also to protest the prosecution of the war.  While these poets never gained the fame of men like Walt Whitman or Robert Frost, they did have critical acclaim in their time and helped many make sense of the war, or allowed people to express their anger and frustration. One of the most noted war poets was Siegfried Sassoon, a British Officer, whose poetry became a focal point of dissent against the continuation of the war.

Sassoon’s poem, “Storm and Sunlight” (below) is an expression of both horror and hope. 

In barns we crouch, and under stacks of straw,

Harking the storm that rides a hurtling legion

Up the arched sky, and speeds quick heels of panic

With growling thunder loosed in fork and clap

That echoes crashing thro’ the slumbrous vault.

The whispering woodlands darken: vulture Gloom

Stoops, menacing the skeltering flocks of Light,

Where the gaunt shepherd shakes his gleaming staff

And foots with angry tidings down the slope.

Drip, drip; the rain steals in through soaking thatch

By cob-webbed rafters to the dusty floor.

Drums shatter in the tumult; wrathful Chaos

Points pealing din to the zenith, then resolves

Terror in wonderment with rich collapse.

II

Now from drenched eaves a swallow darts to skim

The crystal stillness of an air unveiled

To tremulous blue. Raise your bowed heads, and let

Your horns adore the sky, ye patient kine!

Haste, flashing brooks! Small, chuckling rills, rejoice!

Be open-eyed for Heaven, ye pools of peace!

Shine, rain-bow hills! Dream on, fair glimpsèd vale

In haze of drifting gold! And all sweet birds,

Sing out your raptures to the radiant leaves!

And ye, close huddling Men, come forth to stand

A moment simple in the gaze of God

That sweeps along your pastures! Breathe his might!

Lift your blind faces to be filled with day,

And share his benediction with the flowers.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

During this Thanksgiving season, I challenge myself, and my readers to be thankful. I challenge you to write, create, sing, pray, drink coffee, celebrate yourself, your family, your colleagues, your profession, your contribution to the world.

Leadership in Uncertain Times

Over the past several years, I have interviewed for jobs at quite a few universities. While most people have strong feelings about job interviews (usually dislike to loathing), I really enjoy the interview process. Some of this comes from the fact that I don’t get nervous and don’t’ have butterflies talking in front of people. The other part comes from the enjoyment of meeting new people and having the opportunity to talk about things that I am passionate about.

Since I am interviewing for leadership positions (Dean of Libraries/University Librarian) I can always expect to get one or more questions related to my leadership/management style. While I always have a number of responses that I give depending on the institution and the tone/shape of the question, I recently have had the opportunity to be a bit more reflective.

For the first ten to fifteen years of my career, I had no interest or desire to be in a leadership position. I saw these leadership positions as “stepping outside the profession” and not getting to do the real work of a librarian. In 1997 I started a doctoral program and two courses I took changed the way that I thought about leadership and management.  One was on university administration and management and the other on leadership. Both courses were taught by very successful women. I came out of those courses with a real appreciation of management/leadership and a nascent belief that this is something I could do.

After being in senior leadership positions for 19 years I am convinced that a library leader is doing the real work of the profession. While I am convinced that library administration is real library work, I still quite often here joking and not so joking quips from some administrators that they don’t do real library work.  The flip side of this is when former colleagues talk about taking a leadership position as going over to the “dark side”.

In the past, one of my stock answers, when asked about by management/leadership style was that I hired good people and got out of their way and let them do their job. I wanted people to know that I am not a micromanager. I went on to explain that my style was collaborative, and I appreciated lots of input from librarians and staff. I listened to people and could be persuaded by the input of others.

In a recent job application, I was asked for a more formal statement on leadership and I had a chance to be more reflective and thoughtful about my response. In thinking about my style and what is important to me, I wrote that my personal leadership philosophy is a mixture of three leadership ideas/philosophies; namely “transformational leadership”, Robert Greenleaf’s “servant leadership” and Nelson Mandela’s “leading from behind”. I think these three philosophies work well together because they are centered on the library’s most important asset; namely its people. Staff (librarians, professional, and support staff) are key to operational and strategic success. Without these key people, a library is a physical or digital warehouse.

Transformational leadership centers on the goal of transforming people and the social systems in which they work. The transformational model involves influence, motivation, stimulation, and consideration. Transformational leader attempts to influence others by modeling behavior that others will seek to emulate. As part of the modeling behavior, the leader never asks the staff to do things that they themselves are unwilling to do. Motivation plays a key role in helping staff to grow and should be a key part of a leader’s plan for supporting professional development across the organization. Transformational leadership focuses on growing the organization through intellectual stimulation and providing individual consideration to staff members rather than taking a cookie cutter approach. I like this approach because of my own penchant for change, innovation, and creativity. It builds support for the ongoing and constant change in libraries and the need to continually reimagine our work.

Servant leadership may seem like an oxymoron to many. How can you lead and also be a servant? The genius of servant leadership is its focus on people and on many of the soft skills that employees often feel that upper administration lacks. These include things like listening, empathy, healing, persuasion, commitment to the growth of people, and building community.  This approach is a holistic approach that builds up and supports people of the organization.  Sage advice from many leaders is to hire and develop people who are smarter than you as they can help advance the organization in ways that a leader alone cannot. Servant leadership provides the type of support that allows this model to flourish.

Nelson Mandela’s thoughts on leading from behind invokes the idea of a shepherd that carefully works in the background and often from behind in helping everyone move forward. It does not mean that the leader is silent or never in a forward role but one where the leader does not always need the limelight.  Leading from behind was part of President Barrack Obama’s strategy and one for which he was roundly criticized by some. Elements of “leading from behind” can be seen in the work of Mahatma Gandhi as well as Martin Luther King. Leading from behind allows the more adventurous (early adopters) to move forward while others follow, all the while being directed/nudged/prodded in a particular direction. It allows for some personal freedom while also allowing the leader to see and influence the overall direction.

We live in uncertain times. Higher education is under attack from many quarters. Funding for higher education and for libraries are a constant challenge. The Library’s mission continues to evolve and grow with changes in technology, scholarship, and the demographics of students and faculty. Each of these changes requires leadership that is sensitive to these and a myriad of other changes and to help the library (read its people) navigate the changes and to be the educational and creative partners that our universities, students, faculty, and our public need.

Leadership in uncertain times requires, I believe, a people-centered approach. A staff who is strong, agile, and constantly learning will enable our libraries to make a significant and lasting impact. It will not make the times less uncertain, but it will make our people more certain of their ability to thrive and grow.

Alignment: Libraries and Universities

I spent 14 years living and driving in Central Maine. Maine has a lot of snow and ice in the winter and once you were off the Interstate, the streets and roads were seldom in stellar condition. There were lots of ruts, broken pavement, and potholes that wreaked havoc on the alignment of your vehicle. You had one of two choices, get the car aligned on a regular basis or deal with a car that wasn’t quite aligned and know that your tires would wear unevenly, and at times the steering would be a bit wonky.

Alignment is certainly an issue beyond your automobile. In the academic library world, we often hear that the university library must be aligned with university priorities. While this seems pretty obvious, the ways in which libraries see their role in supporting institutional priorities is often complex. 

Recently I read a very interesting report “University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning Library Strategies with Institutional Directions” by my highly respected colleagues Constance Malpas, Lorcan Dempsey, and Rona Stein from OCLC Research and Roger Schonfeld and Deanna Marcum, from OCLC and ITHAKA S+R. The report creates a new institutional typology which provides a more robust and nuanced typology than the highly used Carnegie Classification. It also builds a “library services framework” that can be used to assess/discuss how university libraries align with their parent institution. While both institutional typology and the library services framework provide much to think about, it is the library services framework that intrigues me.

The Library Services Framework as they have defined it.

1.      Convene Campus Community: Provide spaces and facilitate programs for the community broadly or specific subpopulations to generate engagement, outreach, and inclusion.

2.      Enable Academic Success: Support instruction, facilitate learning, improve information literacy, and/or maximize retention, progression, graduation, and later life success.

3.      Facilitate Information Access: Enable discovery and usage of information resources of any format or ownership; provide for the preservation of general collections.

4.      Foster Scholarship and Creation: Deliver expertise, assistance, tools, and services that support research and creative work.

5.      Include and Support Off-Campus Users: Provide equitable access for part-time students, distance and online learners, and other principally off-campus/non-campus/remote users.

6.      Preserve and Promote Unique Collections: Ensure the long-term stewardship of rare materials and special collections, and maximize their usage.

7.      Provide Study Space: Provide physical spaces for academic collaboration, quiet study, and technology-enhanced instruction and/or learning.

8.      Showcase Scholarly Expertise: Promote research excellence and subject matter expertise of scholars and other affiliates; includes repository activities for open access preprint materials.

9.      Transform Scholarly Publishing: Drive toward modernized formats, revamped business models, and reduced market concentration.

“University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning Library Strategies with Institutional Directions (2018) https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2018/oclcresearch-university-futures-library-futures/report.html p 42.

Most library deans and university librarians will look at this list and resonate at some level with all of the elements of the framework. They will see these as core to their work, with some being more important, based on their stated mission and vision.

University level strategic directions are often four or five major areas (e.g. improve student success, increase the university’s research profile, etc.) with a number of goals that spell out how the university expects to achieve them. Libraries seldom find themselves explicitly mentioned in a university strategic plan, so the library must find ways to translate their efforts and map them to the strategic plan. 

This library services framework may provide a conceptual model to map key elements of a library’s program to the university’s plan in a way that resonates both with the library and the university. The nine elements will be familiar, at least in very broad strokes to the university library and parts will quickly resonate with faculty, researchers, students, student affairs, other campus departments, and the Provost’s Office. I certainly will be using this framework in my next job.

When a library maps its program to the university’s strategic directions and creates its own strategic framework, it is, in all likelihood in some sense in alignment with the university. That said, library deans/university librarians are often aspirational and may pick one or more of these elements to focus on as a way to build a program that will advance the library’s abilities and capacity. While this may seem to put them out of strict alignment, they are anticipating the future and watching the evolution of research, scholarship, and publishing. They are taking calculated risks that these investments will pay off and that their libraries will be seen as being critical partners in the educational and research mission of the university.

For example, when I was the Director of Libraries at Colby College, I chose to have the Colby Libraries join as a Founding Member of the Library Publishing Coalition. Colby did not have its own press and was unlikely to start one. That said, I felt this initiative was important as the library began to support other forms of publication – student journals, working papers, grey literature, and self-published works, where external peer review was not critical to the author.  Moving in this direction provided opportunities for faculty to do innovative student assignments (e.g.  a student peer-reviewed economics journal - Journal of Environmental and Resource Economics at Colby- https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/jerec/) and for the library to collect and showcase student work.

Two examples from colleagues can be seen in the work with virtual reality at University of Oklahoma Libraries (Rick Luce and Carl Grant) and with Artificial Intelligence at the University of Rhode Island Library (Karim Boughida). In both cases, these progressive library deans saw some nascent work in faculty ranks or saw these as new tools of scholarship that had broad disciplinary and interdisciplinary possibilities. They did this to support student innovation and creativity, which is often a university priority. Both saw their respective libraries as the logical place to showcase and support these new tools so that they would be available to all students and faculty.

I do not think of the library’s alignment to the university mission and strategy as a straight line, or even two parallel lines, like alignment in an automobile. Rather I prefer to think of library and university alignment as a double helix with the library and a university generally heading in a fixed direction (the axis of the double helix) and the library and university represented by the helices, with their trajectories moving out and away and then back again and crossing as new initiatives that support the strategic directions ramp up and are completed and new initiatives begin. At any given point, both are moving broadly in the same direction, but with the freedom to experiment with new initiatives and to fold those into existing work as they mature or to discard them if they are not fruitful.

I hope that using the double helix model as a way to think about alignment will encourage an element of creativity and innovation as libraries align their strategies with the university.

Be Who You Are: Libraries and Living an Authentic Life

October was LGBT History Month and to those in the LGBTQ community, it represents a month that is both hopeful and one that is fraught with fear and anxiety. If you have any LGBTQ friends or family, you probably know of their struggle to come out and to live an authentic life; one that reflects who they are, and not who various parts of society says they must be. Still, in too many parts of the US and across the world, LGBTQ people are treated as 2^nd class citizens or worse. They are discriminated against at work, by the government, and by many of their families. Suicide is still a major problem for LGTBQ youth. They are bullied and ridiculed. They see coming out or living an authentic life impossible and suicide as a way out.

The need to be authentic is not limited to the LGBTQ community. Most under-represented minorities face pressure to conform to societal norms, usually the norms of the white, English speaking majority. Members of the Hispanic or Asian community are regularly shamed when they speak their native language in public. Growing up, my grandmother was shamed for speaking French, so much so that when she learned English she never spoke French again or passed it on to her children. African Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and Asians are still in many, many places treated as if they don’t belong to this United States. They live in fear of being beaten, killed, or harassed just for existing, or for being in places where someone thinks they should not be.

Women, especially over the last hundred or so years, have emerged from the shadows and become a force in education and the workforce. The women’s liberation movement, beginning in the late 1960’s and well into the 1980’s, radically changed the role of women and how they are perceived. However, too many women and girls are still not afforded the opportunities to use their talent and skills. The #MeToo movement, which exploded on social media in October 2017, illustrates that way too often women are still not afforded the opportunity to live an authentic life; but rather are belittled through sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse.

People from many religious traditions often feel they cannot live an authentic life as others mock their beliefs. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and followers of every other religious traditions comes in for their share of mocking and ridicule in some part of society.  Tolerance for the beliefs and customs of others has not been a part of the vocabulary and ethos of most religious traditions, and this leads to hatred of the other. This makes it difficult for any individual who struggles with or against their own tradition.

There are two grand challenges for living an authentic life. One is for any normative group (in my case- white, male, Christian) to not demonize or belittle anyone who is not like us. The second is to welcome those not like us to community; to treat others as we wish to be treated. Easy words to write, difficult to live.

What then do Libraries have to do with living an authentic life?  The answer is quite simple. Libraries support individuals and families with information and programming that supports people across all of society. Librarians and libraries consistently build collections and put on programs that support people across the spectrum of their communities. While some will consider libraries to be bastions of the liberal left, they are in reality pretty balanced in purchasing books and media that cover all perspectives and reach a wide audience. They open their meeting rooms to community and religious groups.

 I can walk into most public libraries and find a Koran, a Bible, the Torah, Buddhist texts, and books on paganism. I can find books representing the broad political spectrum of the US and find literature and film that broadly represents the community the library serves. If you happen to be in a major city you will also find books in multiple languages and ones that represent the rich cultural tapestry of the city.

Over the past 10 years or so, I have become acutely aware of the role that libraries and librarians play in advancing social justice. Broadly speaking, social justice, is the idea of providing support for marginalized people to the point that they have access to the same opportunities and privileges of the majority. Libraries make a concerted effort to build collections and services that are broad and representative. Librarians are often at the forefront of standing up for those who are marginalized in many ways.

I’ve been impressed by the work that libraries, like the Los Angeles Public Library and New York Public Library, are doing with the homeless and with new Americans. Both groups are struggling with creating an identity and a safe space and society is not always welcoming.  Libraries across the US are stepping up and saying, “we can help”, “we’ve got your back”.

Librarians have certainly been very active in the LGBTQ space and have not only made the library profession more welcoming but also have tried to provide resources and programming to make LGBTQ folks feel welcome, safe, and valued. Libraries consistently push back when individuals and groups attempt censorship of LGBTQ materials in libraries; arguing that LGBTQ people should be able to find materials that represent their lived experiences in their local libraries. Likewise, libraries have been at the forefront of making members of the Muslim community feel welcome.

Libraries value and advocate for privacy and confidentiality. This is critical for people who may want to research a topic that they don’t want others to know about. This could be a woman in an abusive relationship looking for information on shelters, or an LGBTQ youth trying to find out if they’re normal, or a young teen wanting information on sex. Ensuring that authorities don’t poach circulation records or Internet search histories, libraries provide a level of freedom for people to be themselves.

Live an authentic life. Love your library. Support others in fulfilling who they are meant to be.