^ from the Mesa Library. Pretty clear what happens at this desk, no?

^ Good design? Racist? You be the judge…

^ Um, yeah, ok, I think I will keep off. Thanks.

^ Whether you liked the guy or not, that is pretty early for happy hour to end.

^ A pretty solid Valentine’s Day promo!

^ Highway 17 you say? Yeah, I’ll see you there…

^ How could I have missed the Sean Healen Band on New Years Eve??? Yarg.

It’s called the 10-Day No-Work Post-Conference Rule. Amazingly, it means exactly what it sounds like. In the 10 days following the conference, try to give your brain a break and resist delving into committee business or other conference-inspired work. After requiring sponge-duty of your brain — ordering it to soak up every bit of information –  it deserves a vacation. My bean will be relaxing and enjoying the third Luxe installment,  Envy by Anna Godbersen.

If you doubt me … this advice comes straight from ALA staffers John Chrastka, Director of Membership Development, and Michael Dowling, Director of International and Chapter Relations Offices.

Anyways, when I travel I like to start up some conversation with the locals.  You can see every sight in a town, but if you don’t talk to the people you might as well have stayed home and watched a special on the travel channel.  People make places; that very fact is why public libraries are different every place you go.  People and culture differ everywhere, so the library buildings and collections do too.  Fresh out of the ALA conference I couldn’t help but ask the retired rancher sitting next to me at the bar if he used his public library.

What a total feel-good moment for a traveling librarian.  The man pulled out his wallet, showed me his library card, explained to me about all four locations, and immediately started singing the praises of public libraries.  He told me how he fights for responsible oil and gas production as well as sustainable energy production in his state.  We talked about education and books; he suggested I read the Roberto Bolano novel 2666 and I suggested he read Cradle to Cradle by McDonough and Braungart.

My informal library advocacy roadtrip continues today as I head to the hot springs in Jemez.  I’ll check back in and let you know what the people have to say about libraries over there.

I was saying to my neighbor on the Super Shuttle from the airport the other day about how ALA should sponsor bike rentals during Annual Conference so that we could get our morning exercise getting to the meetings that way if we choose.   Maybe someone in Conference planning is reading?  I’ll just let the idea hang there until it ripens…

But look! Walking a little distance from the Colorado Convention Center the other day (at Wellington E. Webb Municipal Building, to be exact) I noticed a couple of racks stocked with white bicycles and a vending machine that accepts a  smart card for the release of one of these road bikes for the day.  I guess riders need to bring their own lock and helmet.

Denver is not the least transportation unfriendly city I’ve come across, but it is fairly car-centered.  It’s nice, though, to see such a conscious effort to take things in the other direction by encouraging cycling.   It also encourages participants to think more about how they can share resources and be a bit less isolated in their communities.  Like a library book, a theft of one of these bikes is a theft from the community and therefore  much less tempting.  Besides, the bikes provided for these municipal experiments are always fairly generic-looking.  They get you from A to B, are good for the environment, and cost less too.

Wish it weren’t so cold and snowy, I might have used one.

To best describe the nature of one bit of progress made at the basement meeting, I invite you to view and consider this piece of video art called “Shredded Swiss Cheese” by Noah Fisk.

When I saw this video of someone acting out the tongue-twister “Shredded Swiss Cheese”, the first thing I did was laugh.  Then I reflected on what Fisk might be getting at.   A tongue-twister completely loses its meaning once it is removed from its oral origins.  Fisk’s piece is a media ecologist’s prank.  The video remediation of the phrase essentially turned it all into nonsense, and the joke is on you.

Back over to the OSC project.  Right now, anyone with a LibraryThing account can fit their books into the OSC’s  first draft of 20 top-level categories.  Here are their instructions and here are those 20 categories:

Want to help? Go to a work page in LibraryThing and scroll down to the bottom. You’ll find a chart of the top-level categories. If you see a good match, click on it. You’ll be prompted to say whether you know the book yourself or not. And then you’ll get to see how your classification vote match up with anyone else on the site.

So, for now, the only people who are contributing information to a project designed to arrange materials in a physical space are individuals browsing an online catalog.  As a public librarian myself, I can attest to the fact that many of the users still use a library staff member as a discovery tool rather than the catalog.  Everyone at the meeting agreed that gathering data from LibraryThing users to create these 20 top level categories is the logical place to start, but it is absolutely essential that data come from flesh-and-blood humans to inform the very flesh-and-blood activity of locating the book you want in a room full of other books that you do not want.

By gathering your data in a digital environment to inform a project that is realized in a physical environment, you run the risk of accidentaly making a video tongue-twister.  The rules are different, the users are different, experience is different.  For this reason, I’m excited to hear that the OSC is going to be developing some kind of survey for distribution in actual libraries.  I’m also really excited for a library to buy into this project so that when the OSC folk are ready to do so some prototyping and user testing it can happen in a real world architecture with real library users.  I do think there is value in this project.  I don’t hate on Dewey, but I think libraries and librarians should always be testing and pushing at the things we take for granted or lean back on.  Watch and participate in this OSC project; its success can only come from everyone’s participation.

To keep from being caught by the police, they threw their pamphlets out of windows during parades. They crawled into the trolley yards at night and stuck their pamphlets to the roofs of trolleys, and, as the sun dried the mornig dew, the pamphlets flew off into the city streets. They used wet pieces of bread to stick the pamphlets to roofs; the pamphlets would float down to the streets after pigeons ate the bread.

After 20 months, Viktor was caught and sentenced to five years in a Gulag. He survived and, after Glasnost, the Gulag where he was imprisoned was turned into a museum. Today, Victor is on the board of that museum. He is also a librarian.

Viktor has what Code of Ethics 20th Anniversary speaker Rushwoth Kidder refers to as moral courage, a willingness to endure significant danger for the sake of principle.

It’s rare that librarians in this country are faced with dangerous situations, but we do face moral dilemmas, instances when two values we hold as right collide. When this occurs, we look to our Code of Ethics, one of the older professional ethical codes in this country. When challenged by competing values, we turn to to it to help us defend our belief in protecting privacy, our resistance to censorship, and our insistance on honesty. It’s what we’ve been doing since the the code was accepted 70 years ago today (though we revised it in 1981, 1995, and gave it a minor but important revision, regarding intellectual property, in 2008).

As Dr. Kidder pointed out, chocolate, libraries, and ethics are countercyclical. That is, we thrive when other elements of the economy are suffering. In his opinion, and I have no reason to doubt him because he knows far more about ethics than I do, people are coming to the library, especially right now, not just in search of free information, entertainment, or assistance finding jobs. They’re coming because we help to create a culture of integrity, a safe place for people to develop their moral compasses.

While I wouldn’t have thought to put it that way, that’s certainly one of the things that libraries gave me as a choild, and something they continue to offer me today. It’s nice to think they offer that to everyone and that everyone sees it as valuable, and so I do–that’s exactly what I think.

However, Beth Gallaway brought up an excellent point via her twitter:  “If they [tags] are standardized it becomes a formal taxonomy … Which is the opposite of a folksonomy.”

And isn’t one of the great things about social media the folksonomy – a chance to see what comes out of the various minds on the internet, to allow people to search and categorize in all sorts of ways?  It doesn’t take up real estate to tag both “teen culture” and “emo” so why not?  Who know what connections can be made if we leave the field open?

I finally broke away to observe the YALSA Board Meeting for a little while – good stuff. First of all, is it customary for board meetings to limit discussion on each topic to ten minutes? I think that’s great – it really kept things moving along. I am considering stealing the concept for staff meetings.

I caught the last half of the “mega topic” – a (slightly) longer conversation about whether YALSA should expand their services to include older teens and 20-somethings. Services to this age group are lacking in most (but certainly not all) libraries, and I hope that YALSA will discuss this further. Check out an excellent article about underserved teens and young adults in Library Journal – The Disconnected: Who these 3.8 million people are, and why libraries need to help them by Kathy Degyansky. Although the article makes it clear that this is an issue that should be tackled by adult departments as well, any focus on the subject could be valuable and necessary.

Also of interest were the motions to create two new Discussion and Interest Groups: Readers Advisory and Summer Reading Programs. Cara Kinsey of NYPL proposed the Readers Advisory group, hoping to foster a community of both conference attendees and online participants who could discuss how to use the lists that YALSA generates to recommend reading to teens. Cara is particularly interested in the opportunity presented by an online community that could be created in Drupal or another format, allowing librarians to have sustained conversations about RA.  Cara stated that one of her inspirations was the PLA RA group, which boasts 300+ members.  The motion passed, and I’m looking forward to participating. The other group formed, Summer Reading Programs, will allow participants to discuss Summer Reading Programming in a separate venue from reading and book discussions.

Finally, the other item of interest discussed (for me, of course – the board seemed interested and engaged in everything they discussed – I think that’s another benefit of the 10-minute discussion rule) was the proposal by the Teens and Technology Committee to create a Library Technology Innovation award. The board seemed interested, but was concerned about funding and overlap with the Teen Tech Week mini-grants, so they sent the proposal back to be elaborated upon. I think the outcome there could be very interesting.

I’m hoping to pop back in on the board tomorrow, if time permits. And I’ll be at the YALSA discussion and interest groups thingamabob tomorrow at 4!

After an awful day of travel yesterday, I’ve gotten to participate in 2 discussion groups already.

One was an informal dinner with other PLA bloggers last night.  It’s so great to be able to sit around and talk library theory.  Too often when we’re discussing situations in our home libraries, it comes down to personalities and politics.  When you’re talking to librarians from other parts of the library world, you can elevate the conversation – what SHOULD we do, and how can we accomplish it.  That kind of rambling, theory-and-practice conversation is worth the price of admission to conferences, for me.

The second discussion group was Saturday morning’s LLAMA Middle Managers Discussion Group.  Well attended, with around 15 middle managers from public and academic libraries, it featured a well-directed conversation about how to manage and support change in our organizations.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT was the big catchphrase around the table, as librarians discussed how to facilitate change both to our staffers and our administration, and how to communicate about change effectively.

Some of what we talked about:

Understanding that you have to explain the reasons for the change:

• why will this make our organization more effective or more responsive to patron needs?
• how does this change help us meet our strategic goals?

There was a lot of discussion of how to communicate that staff members have to “fake it till they make it” – present the change positively to the public, even if the staff hasn’t bought into the change yet.

The importance of having a strategic plan, and of consulting it often.

• A great suggestion – not only should you measure your progress on goals each year, but you should post your progress quarterly – how close are you, what do you have to do to meet your goal by the year’s end.  Posting and discussing on a quarterly basis makes it more “real” to staff.

Another great point was the importance of having a sponsor for your change – your supervisor’s got to work with you to make sure that you have the resources and the support to make changes happen.

Some debate about how much you show your staff of your frustrations and roadblocks -do you keep everything smooth, or do you admit when you’re blocked or encountering friction?  One of the messages that sounded like it would work was: I’ve got to work within a framework, and so do you, so let’s figure out together how to do that.  Along those lines, the importance of presenting ideas upward effectively was discussed – both for ourselves, and for our staff.  We talked about what administration is looking for when an idea is presented:

• What are we trying to accomplish or solve?
• What are possible solutions?
• What avenues did we explore that did not seem to hold solutions?
• What steps will we need to take to implement the solution we’re recommending?
• What resources and support will we need?

Once we know what our adminstration wants in a presented idea, we should teach that to our staff too – especially the idea of asking and answering the questions of what challenge is being addressed, and what we hope to accomplish with our solution.  Several people mentioned they try to encourage staff to come to them with complaints and questions only once they have an answer.  Which of course, leads to the discussion of what to do when the answer they have doesn’t match up with your library’s goals and strategic plan.

My favorite remark was one of frustration with people who “hate change” – the speaker pointed out that change happens everywhere, to everyone, unless they’re dead.

It looks like LLAMA will be looking into a workshop on change management – if it’s as thoughtful and chockful of ideas as this discussion was, it will be a huge success.

“I have three,” I told him.

“That explains a few things,” he said.

Sometimes you know someone is slighting you and all you can do is smile. This was one of those times.

The thing is, despite that interaction, I tend to romanticize airport security. Not the people who are doing it–I recognize that they’re fallible, and occasionally grumpy or worse–but I feel safe when I fly, because I believe the system itself works.

My take on librarianship is the opposite of my take on airport security. I completely romanticize librarians. I’ve never been around a group of people who seem kinder or smarter or more dedicted. But a lot of the systems seem broken, both in our libraries and our professional associations.

That was how I felt after I attended Friday’s Forum on Education. Apparently, ALA has spent the last ten years reviewing various crises in library education. One of the most recent reviews, a presidential task force charged with creating a list of core competences, was the subject of yesterday’s meeting.

The speakers were brilliant. Michael Gorman moderated, and Rick Rubin, Linda Williams, Ken Haycock, and Janet Swan Hill presented. They are polished speakers, passionate librarians, and they have spent a great deal of time learning about these issues and working to improve the overall state of library education.

Unfortunately, I left the meeting not knowing much more than when it started. I’m not even sure if the last syllable of “competences” sounds like “says” or “seize”.

I know the core competences are a statement of outcomes, that they’re intentionally general, and that they’re intended to invigorate the conversation, frame curricula, and inform employers about what they can expect from people who have have obtained a Masters in LIS.

For now, that may be all there is to know about core competences or accreditation standards. Janet Swan Hill, who you really, really must see present, said she found the ALA accreditation standards really nonspecific. “The first time I read them,” she said, “I thought it was just the preamble.”

That’s how I felt about the Forum. As a recent graduate, I’d hoped to get a better sense of what other library students were learning. As a new library director, I wanted to learn more about the people I hope to hire in the near future. As someone who hopes to teach at a library school, I wanted insight into the curricula I’ll be using. I got none of that.

Sometimes you know you’re being slighted. This was one of those times.