Working Alone (Together)

1 Mar
Another quiet Friday in the office

<sweep, sweep, sweep> Dusting off the cobwebs. It’s been a minute since I’ve visited this Friday spot. Happy New Month! (Happy New Year!)

I found out yesterday that I lost out on another opportunity/award in my professional organization. It’s true what folks say when they lose in these situations, i.e., that it’s an honor to be asked to serve or it’s an honor to be nominated, to be recognized by some of your peers enough to put your name (your person and your body of work) forward. But it wouldn’t be true of me to say that it doesn’t hurt just a bit to lose. So, feeling a bit melancholy about this organization today, I decided to watch the “Meet the Candidates” recording from Wednesday that offered those running for the office of President Elect and the open Board Member seats the opportunity to answer questions related to the organization and our profession as a whole. I’m glad that I did.

It’s good to be reminded, particularly when you’re feeling a little down, of the positive energy of others. I appreciated the many comments that focused on connection and that sense of belonging that means a lot to anyone who’s found a home in a group, professional or otherwise. It’s the lack of these things, I believe in large part, that causes organizations to die. Though a bit dated now, Robert Putnam’s seminal work, Bowling Alone, that came out back in 2000 began a deep discourse into the experience and feeling of disconnect that many in America were struggling to understand. Add on an almost-quarter-of-a-century’s worth of the Internet, social media, cell phones, and a global pandemic, and the expressions and concerns of isolation (both individually and on a national scale) are now considered a health crisis. An epidemic.

It’s a paradox, our society today. We have this ability to connect with anyone from anywhere, and yet this same capacity can lead us to seldom be with anyone. In her beautiful book, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing artfully shares the experience that many know today, i.e., how it is sometimes easiest to be alone when you’re surrounded by people (in the case of her story, living in New York City). The same is true for our connecting devices, our on-line social networks, our Zoom calls, and our DoorDash apps. Surround yourself with all of these things and in time you don’t really need to fully be with anyone. It’s convenience at a cost, however.

We had a discussion in our library management meeting this week (again) about ensuring that people feel connected, appreciated, part of something bigger while working here. And for the first time I admitted that I don’t feel it’s possible anymore – at least not in the way that we once defined it. We have chosen other ways of doing work and after 4 years of doing so, we’re past the point where that old sense of work culture is going to exist. A pandemic forced choices upon us, but we also made choices – choices that we like and appreciate. Flexibility, today, is the thing that people want more than anything else at work. We have ensured flexibility. That was a choice. And choices have consequences, positive, negative, indifferent. We need to mourn them (if we’re sad about it) and then move on in new and different ways. And for those of us who might be sad about the changes – and I include myself, because I do feel lonelier at work with fewer people around – we have to accept the responsibility to find connections in other places and other ways.

These thoughts remind me of an experience I’ve been mulling over for months now. I attended my younger niece’s wedding celebration in Richmond, Virginia last November. I was apprehensive about going for a number of reasons, but in the end was very glad that I did. I saw my brother and sister-in-law, both nieces and their husbands (neither of whom I’d met), my nephew and his girlfriend (also new to me), an aunt and uncle. I sat at the family end of the table, but in reflecting on it I can’t help but think how much I realized that I’m not part of that family. They are a really wonderful family, very close to one another. But I made choices over the past 25-30 years that made it so that we didn’t see each other often. And this had consequences. I have a family of origin that I don’t know much at all. We missed too much of one another’s lives.

I think about how the same thing can (will) happen with our work families over time. That sense of connectedness can get lost when we don’t see one another regularly. It’s easier to fall into silos or to focus on our individual (or department) projects. But it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can make other choices and move forward in new and different ways that will redefine who we are as a group, instead of what we once knew and/or expected.

But it IS hard to feel a part of a group where you don’t know the people very well, so we have to attend to the things that can build connections. Those groups that mean something to us can remain relevant and important to us if/when we make new choices and accept new consequences. I heard this tone in some of the comments of the candidates today, giving me hope for my professional home. I look forward to seeing who wins (and sharing the pangs of loss with those who don’t), as well as where they will lead us.

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Giving Thanks

22 Nov

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everyone! I love Thanksgiving. It has long been my favorite holiday – a low key affair, tucked in between the over-the-top madness of Halloween (what in the world has happened with that holiday?!) and Christmas. I enjoy cooking, football games, fall weather. I do little, if any, shopping but do spend time making gifts and cards during the long weekend. It’s quiet and peaceful and indeed a time to give thanks.

I started a list of thanks in my head last night and so I don’t forget them (and have a place to look back on them during those moments I may feel frustrated and not particularly thankful), I’m going to put them here.

When it comes to my work, I am easily the most thankful for my team in Research & Scholarly Communication Services here at my library. Lisa, Tess, Leah, Kris, and Robert are an amazing group of people who make my job immensely enjoyable. They are talented, creative, both independent and collaborative, and always willing to help while maintaining healthy boundaries for themselves and others. They are accountable, respectful, professional, and each one of them kind and fun to work with. We have done such great work together over the past year (and more) and we have so many wonderful opportunities to do more in the future. I’m grateful for them all.

I’m also thankful to work in a library with an administration (library administration) that is supportive of professional growth and professional service. The latter has meant so much to me in my career and I know that both of these things are not givens for everyone in my profession. Investing in your staff, in my opinion, is essential. It’s putting your money behind your values. For this, I’m grateful.

I admit that I’m at a low point with my feelings for UMass Medical School, where I’ve worked these past 19 years. I’m not convinced that the administration of the university is putting money behind the values it espouses, but that said, I am thankful for this place that I’ve called my work home for so long. I’ve had lots of opportunities to grow, to do different things, even to leave the library for a few years to gain experience in another aspect of research. Before I came to work here, my longest stint at any workplace was 7 years. There’s something to be said for any place that keeps calling you to show up each day for so many days.

I’m thankful for my larger medical / health sciences librarian community – my frolleagues (HT, MJ Tooey). On more than one occasion I’ve said, “I could get stuck pretty much anywhere in the United States and be able to call someone who would at least know someone that I know.” We are an amazing network of people and I’ll always be thankful for landing in this profession.

I’m thankful for plenty of things outside of work, too. I’m thankful for a grand group of friends who are a bit younger than I am, yet who welcome me along to all sorts of youthful engagements (still vacillating on that invite to a late-night music event this evening). I do so many things solo in my life and yet I have so many friends wherever I land. It’s a gift.

I’m also thankful for the people I know around Worcester who keep the music going. From my pal, Linda, who I occasionally sing and play music with, to all of the others who share their immense talents around town, to WCUW, our community radio station where I’m fortunate to spin tunes every other week… if ever I’m looking for an afternoon or evening of music, it’s easy to find here in my hometown. Music makes the world go round. Amen.

I’m thankful for old friends that I’ve known forever. I’m thankful that as I pulled into work this morning and my phone rang, the picture of my best friend and college roommate popped up. It was the whole family, on their way to her mom’s (my adopted mom) house, calling to wish me Happy Thanksgiving (and ask about a clarinet – but that’s another story). I have a good, big handful of friends who have been a part of my life now for 40+ years. Despite miles and time between visits, we remain close and always there for one another. That’s awfully special.

And finally, I am thankful for my warm and comfortable home, complete with someone I’ve also shared a lot of years with, in varying ways. Lynn had a frightening health scare two years ago at Thanksgiving and has gone through a lot since – chemo and radiation and scans and scans. She got WONDERFUL news yesterday that’s likely the best Thanksgiving news I can imagine. AND I’m thankful for that goofy beagle, Bayer, who found me almost a year ago, and for my Tater who’s been with us through most of our Worcester years (still hissing and growling and ruling the house). As we are, we are a family.

I was in a bit of a funk last holiday season. I wasn’t into much of any of it and then when it was over, I felt regret. I’m not going there this year. There is so much sadness and anger and fighting and just the worst of humanity in the world today. I’m not adding to it. I have too much to be thankful for. May you also have much the same.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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The more things change, the more they need to change?

6 Oct

For awhile now, I’ve been mulling over the work that we do in my department of the library. This is in part due to some strategic planning for big changes, planning for a department retreat, and engaging in leadership training. Whenever I find myself asking what it is that we do as health sciences librarians and why we do it, I always end up pulling a book off of my shelf, Access to Medical Knowledge: Libraries, Digitization, and the Public Good. Written by Frances K. Groen in 2007, it is a thoughtful treatise on these very questions.

Frances had a long and distinguished career in medical libraries, culminating as the Trenholme Director of Libraries at McGill University. She was a president of the Medical Library Association and recognized professionally in both the United States and her home country of Canada. I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting with Frances on several occasions and invited her to speak at the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries, Inc. (NAHSL) in 2015.

But back to her book. In the preface she states, “This book was written as an attempt to understand why librarians, whether working in the health care environment or in the academic milieu, make the choices and develop the services that they do. Are they guided by principles or values within a conceptual framework, or are they merely responding opportunistically to a variety of influences – institutional, social, technical, or political?” These two sentences have stuck with me for years and I bring them to mind regularly, particularly when I’m in a place like I find myself now, i.e., planning and leading (or at least trying to).

Frances’s career and study led her to believe that our profession has 3 core values (in my words): (1) ensuring access to quality information to anyone needing it, (2) empowering and educating people to use that information, and (3) preserving knowledge from the past, for the future. Whenever I think about what we do and why we do it, I run it through “The Groen Test” to see if it measures up.

One big issue facing librarians like myself who work in research support and scholarly communications is the push towards open science and the 2022 OSTP Memo that will mandate that the outputs of all federally-funded (United States) research be immediately and freely available to the public starting in December 2025. The repercussions of this mandate will be many and they will be large. I think a lot about how we will tackle it. I think about who will pay for it. I think about structures and processes being redone to make it happen and I think about how this will affect my library, especially my library’s budget.

I think also about other things that we do in my team – maintaining an institutional repository, publishing journals, maintaining a publishing platform, assisting with data management, helping to ensure compliance with funding mandates (publications, data, and more), generating and analyzing reports to demonstrate how research is disseminated, how it has an impact, and always teaching, writing, researching. So many of the things we’re doing now – or at least how we’re doing them – were not common in 2007 (some not even in 2017!), when Frances was writing, but I still run it through the test.

Open science, data management and sharing, and ensuring that we, as an institution, comply with mandates towards these things all clearly support the value of providing access to as wide a group of people as possible. Our institutional repository does the same, while also meeting the value of preserving the knowledge generated by our researchers, faculty, students, and staff. We constantly educate to empower our patrons, to help them find and discern information, and more recently battle the onslaught of disinformation. We help people know how to track their work, how to disseminate it more widely so that it reaches the audiences it needs to reach. This, too, is a means of empowering people to use information.

And so, I feel we pass the test and that the work we do still meets the values of our profession.

But … I’ve also been wondering a lot lately about HOW we do what we do. More specifically, I’ve been wondering if the longstanding belief that academic libraries operate freely, i.e., that we provide resources and services without cost to our users, makes any sense any more. A few weeks back, I worked on a bibliometrics report and a network analysis for a professor. It took a good bit of time, access to some expensive databases and tools, and my own expertise. And when it was done, I happily passed it along. For free. That is our modus operandi. In a way, it’s something that we have adopted as a deeply held value. But does it make sense? Particularly when we are faced with budget cuts and staffing shortages?

What if the library was a core service, like every other core service on campus, and charged for the work we do? I admit that I’m not sold 100% on that idea, but I am more and more convinced that we need to start looking at other models for our services, besides this historically free one. Especially as I think about non-funded government mandates towards open access, I cannot help but think that someone has to pay and it cannot be us. At least not without severe cuts into everything else that we do or more likely, elimination of services and resources all together. And that does start to mess with our values. Messy, it is.

Friday thoughts. I hope my readers have had a good week!

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