Archive | Bits and Pieces RSS feed for this section

Mixed Messages

30 Jun

After arriving at work on Wednesday to see a newly erected metal detector* at my workplace, I was preparing to have another rant here this week. I was going to go on about how something advertised as “employee/visitor threat screening” did anything but make me feel safe and/or secure at work. I was going to pose the question, “How are we supposed to be a ‘community’ when we’re seeing one another as threats?” I was going to state how overly sick I am of the over-reaches into my privacy through badge swipes at every door, security personnel at main entrances, an onerous visitor policy – all for what is still supposed to be a public university. And lastly, I was going to ask when we suddenly became such a dangerous place to work. Either the administration is hyping up security for no other reason that sucking up to the expanding, fear-based (and lucrative) security industry or they’re being anything but transparent about what goes on here. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a single incident to warrant all of this build up. Nothing ever close. If the latter is true, that is the real fear, i.e., keeping secrets.

But…

I’m not going to waste anymore time nor thought on this today for a couple reasons. First, when I went for a lunchtime stroll and noticed the fancy detector is gone. Whew!

Secondly, I went for a lunchtime stroll with my newly discovered app, Seek, and I earned the “Plant Eaters Challenge” badge.

Seek is a companion app to iNaturalist, a tool I’ve enjoyed for some years. Both are great ways to learn about nature, participate in citizen science, and have fun meeting challenges. I am drawn to the latter. It’s likely a big part of why I enjoy being a librarian. The “finding stuff” part. The hunt for some elusive thing. The rush of satisfaction when I have said thing in hand. I also love looking for seashells and sand dollars, counting and tracking birds, and staring at patches of clover for that lucky, four-leafed one. Oh, and tracking my beers on the app, Untapped. That one earns you badges, too. I’m pretty certain all of these things are connected.

Learning about nature, paying attention to the animals and plants and insects around me, noticing them, this is much more joyful than entering locked down, guarded up campuses, that’s for sure. Talking with a doc while we looked over the students’ community garden, her being impressed when I pointed out a Baltimore oriole on a nearby tree, this is community. These are the things that make any workplace enjoyable and healthy.

It seems like the administration here is spending an awful lot of money on two very competing things – security and wellness. Right next to where the offending scanner was set up stands a large banner touting our Wellness Network, an elaborate web tool to help employees track their fitness, engage in mental health activities, practice mindfulness, and more. The juxtaposition of these two messages, “Be well!” and “Be wary!”, well I’m just not buying it. It’s a mixed message.

I’m going to focus instead on the things that make me happy and healthy and whole. Like a long weekend ahead! Happy Summer, everyone! And for those in the US, have a safe and happy 4th of July!

*The word is that it wasn’t a metal detector but a “gun detector”, an AI-enabled detection system. Sigh…

Tags: , , , ,

Dinghies and Yachts

16 Jun

The medical school where I work recently celebrated its 50th graduation ceremony. Congratulations to all of the graduates from the med school, the graduate school of biomedical sciences, and the graduate school of nursing on their accomplishments. Congrats to the family members, friends, partners, faculty, mentors, and all who supported and cheered and celebrated along the way. It’s always a nice time to reflect on whatever small role I may have played in helping our students make it through this chapter in their lives. Celebrate!

More good feelings can be had for watching our university, at this point in its own journey, grow. We’re building buildings, growing class sizes, bringing on affiliate locations for students to learn. We’re producing significant research and winning awards and all-around hitting our stride.

Except…

We’re facing budget cuts and hiring freezes, the very things that run counter to growth and celebration. If anything, they bring a quick silence to any spirit of joy.

I’ve been frustrated, personally, by the lack of context given to the situation. How can we grow and stall at the same time? How can we celebrate our accomplishments while we’re told to dismantle the infrastructure that made such achievements possible? How are we supposed to do our jobs well when we don’t have the resources and support needed for such?

Twice now I’ve heard some bit of explanation for our current situation. Inflation (yes, we are all experiencing this in every way), aftereffects of a pandemic (okay), and salary adjustments (well, that’s good).

But wait!

Salary adjustments?

Yes. In our efforts to address some long-standing inequities in pay, some salary adjustments were made to bring those who were being underpaid more in line with what is fair and equitable. This is without any doubt a good thing. It shows we’re serious about one aspect of our DEI efforts, doesn’t it? So why has it bothered me so?

Well, for one reason it shifts some of the blame for budget shortfalls to people who hardly deserve even a hint of such. People who were being underpaid deserve to be brought in line. Please don’t begin to use this as an explanation. That’s completely counter to the idea and sense of equity being sought with the increases.

Another reason is that it brings on calls for that economic theory known as “belt-tightening.” An across-the-board “equal” budget cut means that we’re all being equally asked to “tighten our belts a little.” Just one little notch, everyone. It reminds me of the saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” though in this case the tide is going out AND we don’t all have the same kind of boat.

Departments are affected differently by growing class sizes and growing numbers of faculty. In particular, when it comes to on-line access to journals and databases, a library’s budget has to take into account the number of people it serves. The more people, the higher the cost. So a 5% cut for us also has take into account a x% increase in users. And those in tandem amount to much more than the original percentage asked to cut. It’s a notch-and-a-half, or maybe three, in our belt. It also means a shift in how we provide services, e.g., more ILL requests needing to be filled, something that a hiring freeze frustrates at every turn.

So I began thinking back to equity and thinking back to salaries, because the other thing about different kinds of boats is that some displace a heckuva lot more water than others.

I recently took a quick count of administrators at my workplace. We have a chancellor, a provost who also serves as dean, two other deans, a senior associate dean, nine associate deans, eight assistant deans, twelve vice chancellors, four vice provosts, five assistant vice provosts, and countless department chairs. Now I’m not specifically going to call out any individual and claim his/her/their role isn’t important. I have no idea what all of these roles can possibly entail, anyway. But what I will say is that it is demoralizing to be told that if everybody just gives a little, an EQUAL little, we’ll get through this. Because it’s not equal. Not anywhere close.

I like my job a lot. I like where I work. I’ve been given a lot of opportunities to grow, to learn, to be fulfilled in what I do. But I’m increasingly frustrated by being asked to just do a little more, to fill this role or that position (just for a little while), to pitch in, to be a team player – all simply to keep our small boat afloat while the wake of a giant luxury yacht is swamping us.

Then I woke up the other morning thinking, in all of my years – working, watching, observing, aging – I have NEVER heard someone suggest that we fill a shortfall by adjusting salaries at the other end. The high end. How about achieving equity that way? Why hasn’t that ever been given a go?

In no way do I suggest that I ought to be paid in line with the chancellor of my university. Not at all. I’m not even suggesting that I feel underpaid for what I do (despite the fact that we are the lowest paid librarians in the state system). But that said, I did a little math. In the past 12 years (2010-2022), my earnings in total leave me a half of a million dollars short of the chancellor. For his salary last year. I couldn’t find the data for the 5 years before that (2005-2010). If I had that, I could account for my entire earnings from the state since my employment began. But I can just about guarantee that it still leaves me well short of the chancellor’s annual salary in 2022 alone. Eighteen years and counting and I’m still a half-million behind his one year.

That’s a punch in the gut. And way more than a little unfair. Again, it’s not unfair that he makes more, it’s unfair that his administration proposes an argument that salary adjustments (at the bottom) are in any way responsible for where we are today. Not in the least.

Tags: ,

My Odd Obsession with Office Supplies

2 Jun

I loved going back to school. Summers off were fun, of course – lounging at the swim club, riding my bike everywhere, family camping vacations, basketball camp. Carefree days that seemed to last so much longer than days today. But fall is my favorite season and the end of summer always meant a new school year. And a new school year meant … new school supplies!! New notebooks, new pens and pencils, new packs of paper, new zip folders, and a new lunchbox. I loved the list, the shopping, the putting everything together. New clothes were okay, but new school supplies? Now we’re talking!

I still love office supplies. I love to go to Staples (though I visit so infrequently now that they’ve closed nearby stores). We have cabinets in the back staff room of my library with boxes of paper clips, staples, folders, sticky notes, pens and pencils, highlighters, spiral notebooks. Sometimes when I’m waiting for my lunch to reheat in the microwave, I’ll just poke around to see what’s new there. Sometimes I’ll take a new pencil, just to sharpen it.

And my obsession doesn’t end with the supplies themselves. No. I have BOOKS about office supplies. I read James Ward’s, Perfection of the Paper Clip. I have Caroline Weaver’s, Pencils You Should Know. I’ve read every book in Ian Sansom’s “Mobile Library Mystery Series,” but I’ve also read his book, Paper: An Elegy.

All of this is prelude to describe my absolute joy and delight when Craig Robertson, PhD, associate professor of communications at Northeastern University, delivered this year’s Leiter Lecture during the opening plenary session of the Medical Library Association’s annual meeting in Detroit a couple weeks back. The title of his talk was the title of his latest book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information.

You can only guess how drawn I was, immediately, to the talk. I learned that the filing cabinet was invented in the 1890 by Library Bureau, a business founded by Melvin Dewey (yes, the same) to build and provide supplies to libraries. I learned that the filing cabinet was – and still is – a key technology. While we might not see the long rows and banks of filing cabinets that once filled offices, the concepts of files, folders, and tabs that we make use of daily with our computers are concepts straight outta the filing cabinet.

More interesting, Robertson traced the history of sexism in business and information professions through the history of filing cabinets, from their height, to the size of the drawers, to advertising images showing women doing the filing (even disembodied female hands filing) while men sit at their desks, waiting for the information. I learned about “deskilling” in the office setting, about Barney Google (Google!), about capitalism and the economization of knowledge. It was a brilliant talk that left me wanting more, so of course I bought the book! (Even got it autographed.)

I’ve spent countless hours as a librarian thinking about the repercussions of our predominantly female workforce operating in a male-driven world. I’ve thought about how people (more often men) do the very same type of work but call it “information management” or “information technology.” I’ve thought about how calling the work something else and then building a male-dominated workforce around it yields a higher paying profession. I’ve thought about the gigantic wave of data and data science, and how male-dominated (and higher paying) these professions are to date. Filing cabinets were for women; computers for men. Or so it seems. (Caveat: I am speaking in grand terms here. Please don’t yell back at me that women are not represented at all in Silicon Valley.)

Tracing the history of these trends through the filing cabinet is fascinating to me. I enjoyed the lecture tremendously and can’t wait to read the book in full. I’m obsessed.

My sketchnotes of the lecture can be found here.

Tags: , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →