I am going to make a whole slew of posts about #ALA11 between now and the end of next week; I have to do a report for work, anyway, and I find myself full of ideas and plans–as one should be after a conference. It will all take some time to process and write up, though.
This post is separate, because it isn’t strictly about ALA. It probably comes in part from some of those discussions and the post-processing I’ve found myself doing, but it also comes from some long-standing frustrations I’ve been experiencing and all of the thought I’ve put into those–more specifically, how to solve those. And from that feeling you get when you get back from a conference and back to work. You know the one I mean.
Anyway, at my library, we have this model which sounded to me like a great idea when I was coming into this job: you get to do a little of everything. It turns out that I’m pretty interested in everything, so, in theory, it works out well! Obviously, the bulk of my job is “web stuff,” maintaining/updating our website, running our Web Team, running our Social Media Team (this need not be my job, forever; I guess if we hired an Outreach Librarian, s/he would take over that duty, eventually, but for now, I’m our huckleberry), some eresources stuff, etc. But I’m also a liaison to Electrical Engineering, Computer Systems Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, which means I have collection development duties in those fields and should, in theory, be really in touch with what’s going on in those departments. Also, as do [nearly] all of our librarians, I have a couple of hours of reference desk duty each week and one weekend day per semester. And there seems to be an expectation that I will be doing instruction, as well, at least for the engineers and probably also for our intro-level English and/or Guidance programs.
Here’s the thing: those are all really important and interesting jobs. I really think I could excel at any of them, and I would enjoy any of them. (Recall, I thought I’d be an engineering librarian when I got out of library school.) But to do them really well, they are full-time, or at least mostly-full-time jobs! To (forgive my French) half-ass any of them is a deep shame. I mean, I went to a session on science & technology librarianship, and I was struck, yet again, by how much work a good engineering librarian needs to do–and that’s a big area of growth for UAA, so the library should definitely be doing more of it! I went to a session on reference and outreach, and while that alone need not be a full-time job, there’s a lot of work involved in being a very good reference librarian, particularly if you want to do proactive reference on Twitter, or, my big challenge: to answer questions requiring local knowledge (including finding reference sources that people hid in the desk area, rather than on the shelves in call-letter order, where I tend to look for them, just for instance; or anything involving microfilm or Alaska-specific research) even half-way competently. I didn’t have time to go to any sessions on instruction–the fact that I couldn’t even attend sessions on all of the aspects of my job is telling, I think–but it was covered, a little, in some of the sessions I did attend. And all I learned was that I know practically nothing. Did you know there are different kinds of instruction–problem-based, outcome-based, and so on… if I even got the terminology right? I didn’t. I still don’t know what those terms mean. Hey, I still don’t know how to get in front of a class of freshmen without feeling all nervous and like they’re judging me–and how to make them comfortable and willing to learn, let alone how to make the information less than deadly boring, or how to make it stick. I did a great job in small groups, as a teaching assistant, but that was in a different field, and I was more like a peer, then, and less like a librarian.
And the main aspect of my job–the web stuff? There’s still so much left for me to learn, there! I need to learn how to do analytics right, how to do user experience testing right, how to make XML maps for search engine optimization, how to design a workable information architecture (not a one-time lesson, of course, but something that requires practice to continually improve), and, after all of that, how to work with some of the APIs we have access to, in order to build excellent services for our students. That’s on top of building up my PHP and database skills, which aren’t nonexistent, but could use some serious upgrading. And my skills at dealing with a large organization full of people who are too busy to take big changes to our web presence in stride–this has been a major focus, in my first year and a half here, but I still have some work to do.
This all makes me feel hopeless. … I mean, I had a positive message I was going to try to get across, with this post, but it’s so easy to lose my positivity, under the weight of all of the things I need to already have learned, to be successful–and all of the things I feel I’m failing at, that I have kind of lost my point, in detailing all of this. I guess it’s that all of it is very exciting and very important to me, but it’s really too much for one person.
My other point is, it’s clear to me that I need to have more conversations with my colleagues and work with them to find ways to fix this. I’m going to have to, as we say in the gaming community, “min-max,” a bit, to be effective at any of this–I can’t spread my attention out as widely as it has to go, but will instead have to focus on one or two core things. Perhaps I can take more hours on the ref desk and not do instruction, in order to improve my local knowledge and get to know my [website] user population better. Perhaps the library as a whole can buy more software for internal use, instead of supporting so many open source solutions, so that I can focus nearly all of my web development time our external-facing web presence needs–OK, here, I’m mostly just thinking of our reference tracking software, which has some nasty internal bugs and a whole lot of hacking behind it, but, looking ahead, there’s a major hack coming up on our scheduling software, too; by then, I might be able to find a commercial solution, rather than going crazy with coding. Maybe I can swap my three departments in a major area of growth for one department that’s more stable–on one hand, I like engineers and enjoy working with them, but on the other, I’m not really working with them now; I’ve only met one of them in person, only emailed them a couple of times, and only received one book request, ever. I don’t have the time to give them the support they deserve, nor do I follow the literature in electrical or any other kind of engineering in my spare time–which is all the time I have left to give to my liaison area. (It’s almost a shame Women’s Studies just got a liaison–I read feminist blogs for fun–though I am glad to see them represented in the library. Alas, computer science is taken, and we have no ornithology program, nor a user interface design program, nor … well, we have faculty in “Library Science,” but we probably don’t need a dedicated liaison; that’s just too meta. We also don’t buy popular science books. So to hope it’s something that relates to what I already read might be too much.) Perhaps some of my colleagues can give me training in how to do collection development more effectively, or on “Liaising With a Low Budget [of Time].” And I can, as I said, give up a little more of my spare time, at least temporarily: I can take a PHP or database class, when it’s offered, with all that free tuition I get.
So, I mean, there’s hope. But if I’ve seemed tired, or beaten down, in some of my discourse, I guess this is my explanation of what’s been happening. It has taken me time to understand what’s going on and why I have lost so much of that energy I came in with. It’s become too easy for me to lose sight of all the great stuff that’s happening, or that I could help make happen, because I’ve felt too many things bearing down on me, and I’ve felt like I was failing at many aspects of my job. This is me putting out there in the universe that I plan to do something about that, rather than let myself be beaten down, or burned out, or whatever comes of feeling like a failure, long-term. Something has to give. Even if it’s just my own attitude.
So, um, do any of the rest of you have this kind of problem? I mean, not being too busy–because we all have that–but having too many hats?
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