Technical Services Anonymous

"Hi, my name is Blake and I am a recovering Technical Services Librarian."

I introduced myself this way at the Technical Services Interest Group meeting tonight just to be funny. (That's me, the frustrated class ham.) But there is something therapeutic about all sitting in a circle and talking about Technical Services stuff for two hours with other like-minded librarians.

Since I am on the Education Committee, several people have asked me why there is a separate Technical Services Interest Group meeting on Tuesday evenings during the pre-pre-conference wind-up. To quote Tevye, "I don't know. But it's a tradition." Maybe someone out there who has been part of ATLA conferences longer than I have (you know, someone who's getting a little, um, old) can shed some light on how the pre-pre-conference Technical Services Interest Group meeting got started.

Even though I am not a Technical Services librarian ever since being sucked over to the dark side of library administration, I still enjoy the Tuesday night TSIG meetings. One reason is because I have been going to the meetings long enough now that it is a chance to reconnect with friends even before the conference gets started. Another reason is because I am a library geek, and the technical aspects of Technical Services strongly appeal to me. Another reason is because I continue to strongly believe that the encoding of data is vital to the retrieval of data, and everything we do as librarians is touched by Technical Services issues.

I heard several common themes tonight. Change, of course, was one of the issues discussed. The constant battle of trying to provide ever more service with ever fewer resources was another issue. We kicked around the pros and cons of no longer pretending that the Library of Congress is a national library; does that hurt us, or does that help us take more initiative to address the issues most important to us? And we spent some of the time focusing on things that encourage and rejuvinate us in our jobs, comparing notes on ways in which our personal passions can overlap with our work as theological librarians.

I was personally challenged by two items tonight: The suggestion that journaling about one's professional life can be just as significant as journaling about one's spiritual or emotional life. I have never been much of a journaler, but it was a new concept for me to think about how a tool like journaling can provide some much-needed reflection in what can otherwise be a harried, task-oriented profession. I was also challenged by Chris Schwartz's comments about blogging being a bit like journaling. (Except everyone gets to read it!) I had not discovered her excellent blog until now -- Cataloging Futures, and I have now added it to both my (pitifully short) blog roll and my RSS feeds.

I may only be a recovering Technical Services librarian, but tonight's TSIG meeting was two hours well spent.

The Calling, Part 1

When I began this blog, I posted The Calling, Part 2 which was about the second thing that had attracted me to a career in theological librarianship. In this post, I want to write about the first thing that attracted me: The service that I can offer to students who are preparing for a vocation of Christian ministry.

As caretakers of theological collections, we gain a kinesthetic appreciation for the collocation of theological knowledge. By this, I mean that we gain an instinctive understanding of how the materials in our collections are actually used in the process of conducting research. The circulation librarian who manages course reserves year in and year out gains a good understanding of the scope of the curriculum even if he or she never attends a faculty meeting. The acquisitions librarian who sees a trend over the years from ordering a lot of church management materials to ordering more materials on spirituality and worship renewal knows something about the forces shaping course content. We walk students to sections in our reference collections where language tools or denominational dictionaries or Bible encyclopedias or New Testament bibliographies can be found, often without even thinking about the call numbers for these materials.

The end result is an ability to assist students in ways that can't be mimicked by keyword searching in a database. One of the best examples of this is the time-honored reference interview. Whether conducted in person, over the phone, or via a chat session, it is one of the ways that we bring our knowledge of our collections to bear on the questions being raised by the researcher. There is a give and take--an information exchange--between researcher and librarian that clarifies the question being asked in the process of identifying resources that can answer it. I have found that helping students to ask better questions can in itself be a rewarding profession.

In a theological setting, this can require students to lower a few barriers. Theological education often is a delicate process of getting seminarians to open their minds to a breadth and depth of theological reflection greater than that of just their home denominational backgrounds. (Here my Protestant bias shows; I wonder if this dynamic is different in Catholic or Orthodox seminaries?) As a librarian, when I participate in this process, I bring to it that kinesthetic knowledge of available resources that results from having devoted a lot of time to collecting and organizing them. I'm enthusiastic about the resources that my library has to offer in response to a research question, and sometimes that enthusiasm rubs off.

And then there are the times when we get to participate in something more formal than a reference interview. At Northern Seminary, my chance to engage in information literacy training comes as part of our Formation for Christian Ministry course, usually taken by students as one of their first classes at seminary. I have one class session to make the case to our new students that doing research well should be formational to their future careers as ministers regardless of whether or not they are planning to pursue ordination. Seminary training is not about learning all the correct answers; it is about learning to ask better questions, for oneself and for those who will bring their own questions in the future. As a theological librarian, I treasure the role that I have in assisting students with forming better questions, and then opening their eyes to the vast wisdom that is available to help them answer those questions.

ATLA Day 3 -- A Librarian's Calling

The Thursday morning plenary address was delivered by Joey Rodger, a long time Quaker who has been a director of both the Public Library Association and the Urban Libraries Council, and who has recently retired from the position of Executive Director of the Pendle Hill Peace Center in Wallingford Pennsylvania.

Joey's address was titled Keeping the Word: Reflections on Sacred and Secular Aspects of Librarianship. In her speech, she reflected on the experience of being called to a vocation of librarianship. "Calling" was defined as parallel to "invitation", and great invitations in our lives are manifest in a stream of small, daily invitations. Joey reminded us that when you do something that you are not called to, you usually get in the way of someone who is. Our sense of calling should come from an understanding of our gifts and dispositions -- there is a "sweet spot" where the world's needs intersect our gifts and calling. Joey twice emphasized that people are sacred, texts are not. Or if there is a sacredness in a text like the Bible, it is latent until a person reads it and is injected with that sacredness. Librarians work to join peoples' hearts and minds with the texts that they need. Joey quoted George Fox, "Walk cheerfully over the face of the earth answering that of God in every man."

She left the audience with several questions:

• What was your most whole-hearted hope when you began your work as a librarian? Is that hope still alive?
• How do you feel about the people you serve? That includes authors as well as patrons, staff, and administrators.
• Do you love them enough to serve them?
• What are you listening for? Where are you being led?

I was moved by Joey's words. A sense of vocation is important to my work as a theological librarian, and I thought she did a good job of fleshing out how that call is experienced by many librarians. I particularly liked her use of "skillful" as a criteria for how good or valuable something is. I have long loved the poem, The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart by W.B. Yeats which talks about the "wrong of unshapely things". Part of my calling as a librarian is to do what I can to address the unshapely or unskillful things that I find around me.

At its best, librarianship is an anti-entropic endeavor that seeks to bring order out of chaos. Like washing dishes or dusting the house, it is an endeavor that must often be renewed as things do not stay in order unless we expend energy to keep them that way. I have found this struggle for order to be a rewarding part of being a theological librarian.

To Fine Or Not To Fine

Overdue fines are the Scarlet Letter of librarianship. To my mind, billing patrons for the late return of materials has at least a tinge of public shame to it. The patron has been Bad, therefore he or she needs to be Punished. (Note that I am here only discussing overdue fines for late items, not a bill for the replacement cost of unreturned items -- a different matter altogether.) I know there is a lot more to library fines than just punishment. Two of the valid arguments that I have heard for library fines are that they ensure the equitable sharing of library items (no one person can hang on to them forever), and the fine revenue itself often can fund small improvements to the library that benefit everybody in the long run. (Here are two questions for you: Does your library get to keep the fine money, or does it go into an institutional coffer? If you have to bill a student through their student account, does the money make its way back to the library once collected?)

Every public library that I have ever been in has charged overdue fines; academic libraries seem to be increasingly ambivalent in their attitudes towards fines. The overhead of collecting and receipting (and arguing about) fines often is not justified by the amount collected. Many academic libraries seem to feel that it is less bother to simply withhold transcripts and diplomas until all items are returned and not sweat the day-to-day overdue items.

The whole fine process does highlight how patrons generally sort out into organized and disorganized (alternatively organized?) categories. A goodly number of the organized sort never even incur fines because their materials are always returned or renewed in time. When they do (gasp) incur a fine, they come to the library immediately to pay their $0.40. Those who are alternatively organized regularly incur fines, often in staggering amounts that would show up as visible pie wedges in their Quicken charts if they were ever to make use of a product like Quicken. Please note that this is not an indictment of the alternatively organized -- I have met enough of them to recognize that something like a library fine is just not a Big Hairy Problem to them, and they return their items when they are ready and then pay any fines owed.

There is, though, a subcategory of library patrons who resent being punished for late materials and who work very hard to get any and all fines excused or reduced. These patrons can be in either the organized or alternatively organized category -- I have heard long and complicated explanations of why someone should not be charged $0.20. When this combative personality type overlaps the alternatively organized category, though, librarians encounter some of their thorniest patron problems. Especially if the person in question is a faculty member. The legacy of unreturned items, multiple billing notices, and account blocks is further demonstration of the 80/20 rule -- 20% of your patrons will cause 80% of your billing problems.

In a theological library, I have often felt that there is also a pastoral function to charging overdue fines. It is one way to identify the combative personality type where what is at the heart of the matter is not a question of who returned what when but a question of whether someone is willing to submit to another authority, even as puny an authority as the seminary librarian. When faced with the seminary student who rails against a fine, my response is often to overlook the fine while asking the patron to reflect more closely on his or her calling. That may or may not be a good enough reason to continue the practice of charging overdue fines, but it remains a fairly effective litmus test.

The Calling, Part 2

This post is dedicated to the other librarians that I have met in the American Theological Library Association.

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I figure that if George Lucas can start Star Wars with Part 4, I can start this series with Part 2. In a future posting, I'll tell you about the first thing that drew me to theological librarianship as a career. In this posting, though, I want to tell you about the second thing that drew me to theological librarianship: The great company of living saints with whom I work, my colleagues in this profession.

In my first posting on this blog, I accused my colleagues of all being to some extent conservative -- ours is a profession of preservation, and we have shared interests in heritage and history that cross theological and denominational lines (more about that in a moment). In this posting, I want to accuse my colleagues of all being to some extent liberal -- there is a liberality of spirit that I believe is a shared ethos among librarians, especially among theological librarians.

This starts in our libraries--libraries are service organizations, and most librarians are able to keep that focus even in the midst of departmental reorganizations and budget cuts. It extends to our institutions--most (academic) librarians that I know serve in many different capacities within their schools, and there is a general willingness to contribute to the institutional life beyond working in the library. With theological librarians this also extends to a spirituality of service, expressed in service to others, often through the church. This can be a straightforward kind of service as when librarians volunteer time to run a local church library or contribute to the organization of denominational archives. It can be as demanding as a path of ordination--many theological librarians carry Rev. or Sr. or Dcn. in front of their names. Even when it is not as clearly defined, this spirituality of service evidences itself in open office doors even in technical services, in extra time spent tracking down a reference for another librarian, in answering yet one more reference question before heading home late for dinner (again).

Another indication of the liberality of spirit that I encounter among theological librarians is a generosity towards others of different faith backgrounds. This generosity is not because we do not value our own faith backgrounds; for many of us, our work includes a conscious association with a specific denomination and a desire to contribute to the work of that denomination. I have found, though, that in our common calling as librarians, we are quick to recognize our similarities and slower to focus on our differences. There is a pooling of resources, a sharing of expertise, and a genuine appreciation for the efforts of others that is not stifled by denominational differences or even the liberal/conservative divide. Interacting with other theological librarians, I have learned much more about the breadth of Christian experience than I have ever learned in a church setting or in a seminary class.

My early experience of these things at the start of my library career is a large part of why I am a theological librarian today. To any other theological librarians who happen to wander by this post, thank you!