Misconstrual of the month: naked librarians and involving buns

There must be a copy editor job vacancy at the office of Library review. How else to explain the driving sleet of slips, flubs, gaffes, muffs, typos, punctuation misfirings, and hair-raising solecisms in an article that appears in the most recent issue? With an effusive application of that endearing élan and derring-do of the "librarians rule" school to my professional bailiwick, two South Africans work up a mighty sweat as they trample hard over the conventions of English prose and punctuation in their contribution, The naked librarian: health librarians in the modern era [1].

Little more than a collection of boilerplate truisms and trite exhortations, this essay is a roll-up-your-sleeves call to action, a perky if not always entirely coherent ramble through the usual library science banalities, starting with that most hackneyed of clichés from the last couple of decades. Care to guess what it is? A phrase so familiar that we now hear it being solemnly intoned by bakers, candlestick makers and undertakers: "The only constant is change."

That, of course, is the famous quotation from Isaac Asimov. Nothing to misconstrue there. But back to our scantily attired article. For the next five pages we are marched out into the cold courtyard and put through a vigorous drill of platitudes and commonplaces:

Health information professionals have to envision the future and plan from there. We have to get rid of outdated ideas and revolutionize our way of thinking. Shrugging off the old coat of the stereotypical librarian, we must start off in our envisioned future, as 'naked librarians' turning into brand new and constantly evolving [sic].

After a laundry list of the challenges and obstacles, most of them "huge," facing health libraries in the "modern era," we are exhorted to "use the digital age" and "proactively anticipate the future implications." Once we have done all that "we will be educated in the latest technical lingo and sound just like computer scientists." (Now I know why I became a librarian.) But look at what else our naked chefs are cooking up: "One of the less mined (as yet) areas for us to explore and conquer, is how to make raw data available to everyone." Not even half-baked? Instead of worrying about a post-Google world we are exhorted in a memorably mixed metaphor to "step up to the plate, accept these challenges and go with the flow."

Now perhaps I'm being overly critical when I say that we librarians have really had enough of this. As Candy Hillenbrand wrote in her take on librarianship in the 21st century, "Desperate to slough off the old limiting stereotypes of the stern bespectacled cardigan-clad shushing controller of books, librarians are clamouring to convince themselves, each other and the wider community that there is far more to the humble librarian than meets the casual eye" [2]. Are we so hankering for attention that only disrobing ourselves in public will suffice?

Just what is this fixation on ripping off our tweedy garments and emerging unclad into the light, like Blake's Glad Day? Is some kind of mass psychosis making us want to run through the streets in puris naturalibus? I saw a sign the other day advertising evening classes in pole dancing. Is this part of some larger social pathology? Or have librarians been infected by the myriads of spores invisibly rising from the piles of discarded print materials in our denuded workplaces? What next? When the clothes are gone should we move on to trichotillomania? Please, let us put a stop to this depilatory process, expose the abuse, and doff this tired metaphor once and for all.

But back to the rapidly unravelling Steyn and de Wee. In the last section of their article they offer what I'm sure is meant to be an edifying quote from a newspaper column by Shelley Howells [3] that appeared five years ago in the New Zealand Herald. All very cute and fluffy in a condescending way, Howells' piece is an example of what has become a standard mass-media treatment of librarians. We are secret nonconformists, wise as serpents and clever as foxes. We are wily, rebellious and twee — not a stitch left of our old encumbrances. Here is Howells' opening sentence, as quoted by Steyn and de Wee:

Librarians rock. That reputation that they have involving buns, sensible shoes and shushing people is merely a cunning ruse, developed over centuries, to conceal their real lives as radicals, subversives and providers of extreme helpfulness.

At this point, having ploughed my way dutifully through the entire article, I had become accustomed to its many textual difficulties. I was beginning to understand the challenges faced by the squinting exegetes of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For here I was, rubbing my eyes in confusion. There was something very wrong with the passage. How to figure out the thats? What exactly were those buns? And how did involving buns relate to naked librarians? Flushed with curiosity, I decided to check the original newspaper article, hoping its text had not disappeared into the Internet Gehenna of 404 not-found error pages. I was lucky this time and found it. Here is what Shelley Howells actually wrote:

Librarians rock. That reputation they have involving buns, sensible shoes and shushing people is merely a cunning ruse, developed over centuries, to conceal their real lives as radicals, subversives and providers of extreme helpfulness.

The sharp-eyed among us will note immediately that in the original text there is no that after reputation. Oh what a difference one word can make! When I first read the sentence, Steyn and de Wee's slipshod insertion of the extraneous that in their quotation had thrown me off completely. It put a spanner in the syntactical works, so to speak, leading this innocent reader to think librarians' buns were being described in the same way as their shoes — with an adjective. The extra that altered the sentence's focus and led me to think impure thoughts. Was involving a typo for involuted? What would such buns look like? But then I was brought up short by the non-tensed verb phrase shushing people. It didn't seem to fit with the two previous attributes which I thought I was being told librarians possessed.

My apologies to those of you who aren't grammar buffs, but I have to get technical here. After seeng Howell's original text I was finally able to parse the sentence to my satisfaction. Buns is the object of the gerund involving, which may also be described as a non-tensed verb phrase with -ing participle. Buns is not the object of the verb have. Involving is the first word of a participial defining relative clause which tells us that which the reputation of librarians involves. It is not a participial adjective, as in these examples: dangling participles, burning buns, flaming idiots. For more information on all things participial, see the Cambridge grammar of English [4].

Confused by now? I certainly was. Dangled enough participles for today? I'm ready to hit the showers.

But Steyn and de Wee aren't finished yet. Feel the goosebumps rise as you thrill to their final rallying cry: "Let us shrug off our 'clothes' and get into the new gear of the future! ... From naked librarian to formidable information force."

Oh dear. It's -25 outside and I don't want to dangle for long. This radical subversive and provider of extreme helpfulness would much rather stay indoors and fully clothed, thank you.

References:

1. Steyn C, de Wee JA. The naked librarian: health librarians in the modern era. Library review. 2007;56(9):797-802.

2. Hillenbrand C. Librarianship in the 21st century - crisis or transformation? Australian library journal [serial on the Internet]. 2005 [cited 2008 Mar 4];54(2):[about 5 p.]. Available from: http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/alj/54.2/full.text/hillenbrand.html

3. Howells S. The secret life of tattooed and belly-dancing librarians. New Zealand herald [serial on the Internet]. 2003 Nov 28 [cited 2008 Mar 4]. Available from: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=3536464

4. Carter M, McCarthy M. Cambridge grammar of English: a comprehensive guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006.

The "Ah, Tennyson" moment and the postmodern professional

As a young man Alfred Tennyson was afflicted with a painful attack of piles. Accepting advice, he visited a youthful but well-known proctologist and was so successfully treated that for many years he had no further trouble. However, after he had become a famous poet and had been raised to the peerage, he suffered a further attack. Revisiting the proctologist, he expected to be recognized as the former patient who had become the Poet Laureate. The proctologist, however, gave no signs of recognition. It was only when the noble lord had bent over for examination that the proctologist exclaimed, "Ah, Tennyson."

I treasure this little anecdote, not only because it pokes wry fun at poets and proctologists alike, but because, parable-like, it illustrates a truth about the human condition. Part of its humour arises out of the absurdity that the clinician's concentration on his work should be so complete as to preclude his recognizing the great poet until the baronial drawers have been lowered. There is also, of course, the universal human delight in scatological jokes — the more irreverent the better, since everyone, even an aristocrat, has to sit on the throne.

But there is more to it than that. Implicit in this compelling but elusive narrative is a sense of how blind we can be to anything but the piles of work before and behind us, and how neglectful of the clamouring realities staring us in the face. We may laugh at the single-mindedness of Tennyson's doctor, but librarians are no exception. Squirrelling away at technology, too busy to think, obsessed with getting to the bottom of our own specialties, we suffer a sort of mental constipation, thinking that what we do is an end in itself while we miss the obvious. We are all guilty of this. Librarians can be as heedless as the most absent-minded of professionals.

The impending demise of Canada's leading consumer health information website gave me the opportunity to reflect again on professional short-sightedness and anal-retentiveness. What should librarians, particularly health librarians, think about the motivations and predilections behind the Conservative government's decision to cut funding for the Canadian Health Network? "Conservative" hardly seems to be the appropriate word for what is at work in Ottawa. Au contraire, axing CHN is just one part of a broader, quite radical set of imperatives, it seems to me. As Carol Goar puts it in the very first sentence of her Toronto Star article of November 16, "This is how a nation's social infrastructure is dismantled."

What should we do? Simply wring our hands, adjust our blinkers, and continue working on our promotion? Even the bureaucrats were fumbling for excuses. Shutting down the network was a "very difficult decision," said Alain Desroches of the Public Health Agency. "The agency will continue to look for effective and innovative ways to provide Canadians with high quality, credible information through other means." What, pray tell, might those other means be? Given a government whose primary affinity is with the catechisms of the market, I think we know what to expect.

In fact, Health Minister Tony Clement launched a new website, Healthy Canadians, in October, to provide users with "easy access to Government of Canada health-related promotional campaigns" — the government's children's fitness tax credit, its revised Canada Food Guide, its toy safety tips, its latest product recalls, and its healthy pregnancy guide — all designed to promote the government's vision of what constitutes an active, well-balanced lifestyle. Pregnancy OK, the kind of sex that doesn't result in pregnancy unmentionable. The website looks more like an election ad than a serious source of information for the general public, a feel-good exercise that has been hastily thrown together. What's being promoted is not health but the government itself. This reminds me of the ridiculously widespread use by television networks of the "coming up" promotional advertisement. In addition to being subjected to their incessant commercials, we now must endure frequent and detailed announcements of what they will be telling us later, to the point that a program like CNN news feels like one long advertisement for itself, punctuated regularly by lengthy advertisements for corporations which then finance CNN's own self-promotion. Lost in the midst of this tiresome cycle, this hollow, echoing Lotos-land, is any sense of what is actually occurring in the real world.

The centralization of health information in one place is a good thing. That was the vision behind the Canadian Health Network. Healthy Canadians is something different. As Carol Goar remarks, "What's missing from the new database is any reference to the links between health and the environment, disease and poverty, or violence and gun control. Nor does it touch sensitive topics such as abortion, genetically modified foods or sexual abuse. It completely overlooks mental illness. In contrast, the Canadian Health Network is all-encompassing. It looks at controversial questions from all sides. It is constantly updated as new knowledge becomes available."

What will happen after all the effort put into CHN? Inevitably we are drawn to rationalizing. Losing the program won't be the end of the world. Sad, but true. Canadians will make use, as they already do, of the rich resources of MedlinePlus from the United States and the multitudes of consumer health websites in many languages that have emerged on the web. The CHN contributors and sustainers will find other ways to reach their audiences. Somehow we'll cope. But here is the heart of the issue. Carol Goar again: "[T]he idea of a comprehensive, national database, built and maintained by the best people in their fields will wither. The belief that Canadians can work together, with the government providing a common forum, will wane. A promising experiment will die. And the government will look for another non-essential program to cut."

As information providers (and supposedly civilization's guardians), librarians are caught up willy-nilly in this ongoing ideological demolition job. Libraries, as a vital part of the civic commons, are not immune to the kind of calculation that is likely to erase the Canadian Health Network. It has been said, tongue lodged firmly in cheek, that nothing is so useless as a general maxim. But let me propose a new axiom that seems to me as firmly based as the laws of thermodynamics. Postmodernism is now driving politics as surely as the desert wind is dry. We are sliding into the postmodern, post-civil world; we're already there actually, but the process is so subtle that, like desertification in the Sahel, we see what's happening only with hindsight.

However, alternatives are still possible. Nothing is completely foreordained. Needless to say, there are many in this country who do not approve of this or other actions of the government that threaten the public good. The "Friends of CHN" have formed, one of their first initiatives being to start a petition, both in English and in French, demanding that the Canadian Health Network's funding cut be rescinded, and that full, stable funding be restored immediately to allow the program to become the kind of national resource it was meant to be. Letters are being addressed to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health, people are organizing, bloggers are commenting. But librarians need to do more. So far both the Canadian Library Association and the Canadian Health Libraries Association have been silent. I hope to see some mention of this issue appearing on their websites soon.

To many, what is happening with the Canadian Health Network may seem of little consequence. "Let it go," they'll say. "The market will see to our needs. For that matter, let libraries go as well. Don't we have Web 2.0?" To such a glib proposal I would reply in this way. Once the foundations of the civic commons are removed, stone by stone, in a long process of disintegration of which the quiet removal of CHN is just one episode, there will be little left to remind us of the public polity that was. It will have been replaced by another, less polite, reality. Libraries are not exempt from this process. The new facts on the ground, the only essentials, will be commercial ones, such that culture will have become coextensive with the economy, and consumption will have successfully made itself into an immutable law. Civil society, in my apocalyptic vision, thus undergoes a slow dissolution into a wide-open commercial sphere, a jagged, desolate no-man's-land of receding equality, plutocratic machination, anonymous marauding, and deregulated violence — all garishly backlit by vacuous spectacle, the saturating ubiquity of wall-to-wall ideology. Think of the dystopian science fiction of William Gibson. In this new cultural logic, as Fredric Jameson has maintained, Utopia's deepest subject thus turns out to be precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to imagine what could be. Alternatives become unthinkable. Life becomes, in Adorno's words, the ideology of its own absence.

As the Social Justice Librarian puts it:

When a pro-privatization government cuts national funding to social infrastructure and, at the same time, turns a blind (or at least feeble) eye to corporate challenges to public health and social policy regulations … well, I guess that’s where all that information literacy training we librarians are always pushing comes in. Because health information with a profit-motive is clearly not in the public interest. But without a not-for-profit health education, will we recognize it when we see it?

Speaking of the unthinkable, in her new book, The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein offers a revealing anecdote about her experience at a New Orleans hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A car accident leaves her with minor, but painful, injuries. Conveyed by ambulance to Ochsner Medical Center, "the most modern and calm hospital I have ever been in," Klein receives courteous and comprehensive care. She is amazed by the immaculateness of the wards and the quiet efficiency of the staff:

To a veteran of the Canadian public health care system, these were wholly unfamiliar experiences; I usually wait for forty minutes to see my general practitioner. And this was downtown New Orleans — ground zero of the largest public health emergency in recent U.S. history. A polite administrator came into my room and explained that "in America we pay for health care. I am so sorry, dear — it's really terrible. We wish we had your system. Just fill out this form." (p. 489)

Klein strikes up a conversation with an intern who has kindly slipped her some painkillers since the hospital pharmacy is locked up tight for fear of looters. From him she learns that the Charity Hospital, which serves the city's poor, has been heavily damaged. Then comes the "Ah, Tennyson" moment. "They'd better reopen it," the intern says. "We can't treat those people here." Klein comments:

It occurred to me that this affable young doctor, and the spa-like medical care I had just received, were the embodiment of the culture that had made the horrors of Hurricane Katrina possible, the culture that had left New Orleans' poorest residents to drown. As a graduate of a private medical school and then an intern at a private hospital, he had been trained simply not to see New Orleans turned into a giant emergency room: he had sympathy for the evacuees, but that didn't change the fact that he still could not see them as potential patients of his. (p. 490)

It is this inability to "see" something so obvious to others which, for me, characterizes the blinkered postmodern professional. We have here a terrible disconnect between practice and politics. Here is a promising young physician who cannot, or will not, allow himself to think through unacceptable social conditions, who is content, like Tennyson's proctologist, to focus on what he has been programmed to do while missing the obvious — and losing all the compassionate poetry of life. How many librarians, how many health librarians, are also without eyes to see? In what Lotos-land do we live and lie reclined, careless of mankind, attending only to our objects of professional interest? When shall we have our next "Ah, Tennyson" moment?

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, from The Lotos-Eaters: Choric Song

Hospital librarians and blogging: conversation or ventriloquism?

Over the past few days I have been reflecting on the recent exchange about hospital librarian participation in the great blog rolling contest. It all started with Melissa Rethlefsen's analysis of the results of the MLA’s social networking survey, according to which hospital librarians are not thronging in sufficient numbers to the blog world, nor are we sufficiently contrite, it seems, for this imprudent lack of interest.

It is generally expected that we should always believe what we read in surveys, as this makes them more interesting. What hay is there to be made from the numbers? Are we a bunch of sad sacks and schlemiels stuck in the Edsel era of librarianship, faded as the cover of a Harlequin romance? Are our work lives a permanent code blue? Are we on the losing side in the class struggle? Has the mirror crack'd from side to side?

Why are we not out with the web and floating wide, like our academic cousins? As a hospital librarian and an academic, I would like to bring my own perspective to the matter. I believe I can speak out of both sides of my mouth ... No, let's try that again. I believe I can save both my faces ... Wait a moment. That doesn't sound right either. Anyway, I'll try to speak blog from my own experience.

We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward. (J. Danforth Quayle)

A disappointed David Rothman asked the question What do hospital librarians have against blogs? (24 Oct 2007). The Krafty Librarian explained the dearth of colleagues in the biblioblogosphere in terms of (a) time constraints, (b) insolent IT departments, and (c) the related implications for suicidality. With his usual incisiveness T. Scott summarized the issue in his comment on that post: "Hospital librarians don't feel that they have as much flexibility over their time, and they don't have as much control over the elements of IT that matter the most to them. . . . Maybe the most important difference is that many hospital librarians don't have the daily support of creative colleagues to help spur their own creativity."

Dean Giustini, in his Blog Malaise post (1 Nov 2007), wonders why there are so few bloggers emerging from the ranks of health librarians, lamenting: "We've had maybe a handful of new medical librarian bloggers in the last calendar year" (yours truly included). Pointing to a lack of scholarly literature about blogging and reflective practice in our profession, he presses a number of hot buttons:

It could be that many librarian bloggers are tired of blogging — and blogged right out. Some have abandoned the practice of daily blogging almost completely. Perhaps it didn't make sense to them to engage in all the chit-chat, or perhaps they didn't get the point or the hang of it in the first place. Other bloggers are not engaged enough in critical reflection of their blogging. . . . Blogging loses its purity and purpose when we focus on remix and pointing readers to existing content elsewhere; for heaven's sake, make some observations of the content you point to!

I can hardly disagree with this, although I have reservations about the reference to blogging's "purity and purpose." (I can see the Chinese government handily making use of that expression.) I would maintain that its very lack of purity and purpose is what made blogging catch on in the first place. All the same, what we have here is a plea for more and better blogs in health sciences librarianship. I can support that.

Blogs are swiftly becoming as important to librarians professionally as the published literature, but they require some effort and the occasional bedewed brow. Blogging should come from a genuine interest in and desire to contribute; and a blog should be something more than an exchange of twaddle and a clickathon of easy links, accompanied by an expletive of glee or otherwise. "Blogging should be an extension of our critical-reflective practices," says Dean Giustini. Right on. I would add, to paraphrase Gore Vidal: Blogging is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

Ratcatcher entered the debate a few days later, disposing nicely of the "I'm-too-busy" excuse. This invidious, passive aggressive behaviour in the workplace is a defensive adaptation that points directly to an aberration in the evolution of the human brain — a malformation somewhere in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or possibly an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of an underdone potato. The pessimism of some is countered with a reminder that there has actually been an upsurge in medical librarian blogging, something Ratcatcher finds really exciting. I do too.

C'est si difficile!

Having reviewed the thoughtful discussion of my colleagues, I guess it's time to add an idea or two of my own. It's so hard to know where to start. As I began to gather my own scattered thoughts about the web reticence of hospital librarians, I was distracted by some incoming RSS feeds about contamination in the work place. Is it something in the air that makes setting up a Wordpress or Blogger account look so frightfully complicated? Are hospital librarians inhaling something else along with their scented tea? I considered the recent research on ultrafine particles from office printers and Dr. Michelle Alfa's study of the horrifying swarms of C. difficile found to be colonizing most hospital toilets (the latter research project worryingly performed in my very building.) Then I thought about Theodoric of York, who would say we're not blogging enough because we have a toad or possibly a small dwarf living in our stomachs. Not convinced, you say? I didn't find anything in UpToDate either. So I wiped my hands of it all and moved on.

What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is. (J. Danforth Quayle)

Could the ultimate explanation be found in another malaise: the sense of futility so well expressed in Dean Giustini's post? I thought back to something I read more than twenty years ago in The Listener (March 20, 1986):

The common belief that librarianship is a career is entirely mistaken. It is, like chartered accountancy, a disease which infects its victims with a morbid sense of the futility of life. In the case of accountants, the cause is obvious — it stems from being privy to the pathetic devices by which clients hope to evade the attentions of the Inland Revenue. In the case of librarians, the malaise is more mysterious in origin, but it must have something to do with working in institutions which are, in effect, cold stores for human thought. Staring at serried ranks of unread, or rarely read, books, it must be hard not to be overcome by a feeling that human life is ultimately a waste of time.

Is librarianship bad for our mental health? I'm sure that no one becomes a librarian in the conviction that life is futile, although, like accountants, we too are privy to the pathetic devices by which human beings seek to evade the inevitable: in our case, due dates, accumulating fines, and — ultimate indignity — the bill for a lost book. Consider the tedium of health libraries. All those gruesomely illustrated texts shelved in the W's, all those back issues of Gut. It is exquisite ennui, but sanity requires us to remain mute. That ours may not be the world's most exciting profession must go unmentioned, like rope in a hanged man's home. Yet how profound is our fatigue as we bang on about EBM resources to a roomful of ABH (anywhere but here) medical residents. How bored we are shuffling our 13,000 del.icio.us tags or enduring numerous PubMed arrhythmias in our literature search on Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. How stale the dainties we offer at our open houses and the pointless circumlocutions of the latest strategic plan. Then, just when we have managed to free up a few hours to experiment with Utterz or hooeey, we must hurry off to a dreaded meeting, where minutes are taken and hours wasted. In these ways we have all felt deeply a morbid sense of the fatuity of things.

Stuck in a dank basement steps away from the morgue's cadaver fumes, hospital librarians can be particularly susceptible to this affliction. Why blog, when no one may be listening (certainly not the neighbours), when whatever enthusiasms or insights left in you are like a handful of feathers thrown into the Grand Canyon? Waiting for an echo: that is futility. In The Art of Preserving Health Dr. John Armstrong, whose peculiar poetic talents I have already noted in a previous post, casts his splenetic eye on the fate of the lonely librarius medicus in the cold store of human thought:

Chiefly where solitude, sad nurse of care,
To sickly musing gives the pensive mind,
There madness enters; and the dim-eyed fiend,
Sour melancholy, night and day provokes
Her own eternal wound. The sun grows pale;
A mournful visionary light o'erspreads
The cheerful face of nature: earth becomes
A dreary desert, and heaven frowns above.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence. (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)

Sour indeed is the fate of the isolated, overworked and left behind. But, joking and poetic fromage aside, this alone cannot be the full explanation for the so-called blogging malaise, which if it exists is really a manifestation of a larger problem. Let us move away from the individual for a moment, and get serious. Many hospital librarians work for institutions that are large, impersonal, extremely complex, and decidedly unfree and undemocratic. Look at one of the comments on David Rothman's original post, which I think comes close to where I'm trying to go with this: "There are a lot of 2.0 tools that I use in my personal life, that I would LOVE to use at work, but have been essentially forbidden from even thinking about it."

Forbidden from even thinking about it. There is an Adorno-like bleakness to this kind of self-closure, the slate-clearing via negativa of manufactured assent, the always-already-erased expression of crimethink. ("In an all-embracing system conversation becomes ventriloquism." — Minima Moralia; "Life has become the ideology of its own absence." — Ibid.) I'll be accused of sophomoric philosophizing, but this, it seems to me, is where we come uncomfortably close to what really lies behind the inhibition preventing many hospital librarians from speaking out, whether among colleagues at work, in print, or in the blogosphere. I'm not talking about the common concerns over the quality of one's writing, saying something foolish (that's my specialty), not being interesting enough, or not being cool with computers.

Except for the odd overworked solo operation with only a dial-up modem, it is not really time or technology that stifles creativity. I would not entirely attribute it to the enervated state of being "blogged-out" and palely loitering in the arid interstices of Web 2.0. Nor is it merely a lack of collegial support. Blogging is not ultimately the issue at all. What is the essence of this ideology of its own absence?

Hospital librarians are often not free and do not feel free to express themselves, especially in large institutions. They must conform, both in dress and manner, to management strategies that tend to include the librarian as little more than clerical support for clinical and research priorities. As Adorno would put it, thinking no longer means any more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think. That, at any rate, has been my experience. There are exceptions, of course. Witness the many articulate and successful hospital librarians. Yet I would maintain that the time for independent hospital libraries is over. When my library joined the University I expected, and to a great extent found, a more nurturing professional climate — and other librarians. That really helped. Academic hospital librarians benefit from faculty status and an environment congenial to intellectual expression. But it's not exactly magic. By and large we are still isolated geographically, and we miss out on that all-important daily contact with co-workers. Universities also have their own ranks of snaggle-toothed IT Orcs and querulous, distracted superiors. Much therefore depends, as T. Scott points out, on the level of support from administration. This is a point I want to explore more thoroughly.

In a state of complete powerlessness individuals perceive the time they have left to live as a brief reprieve. (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)

Whether we work miles away or two doors down from the big boss, hospital librarians need to be plugged into the power mains. While there is no lack of creative ferment in most of us, if we do not have the support of administration and are denied authentic participation in the life of the organization, more than our motivation is cut off. Since the consolidation of all of Winnipeg's hospital libraries with the University of Manitoba, my co-workers and I have benefited enormously, and so have our patrons. We got connected, and not just to fantastically expanded online resources. I would say there has been a significant cultural change that has encouraged intellectual expression, experimentation in the life of the web, collaboration, and taking chances — it's like graduating from Harlequin to an Ivy League press. This year we joined our colleagues in fighting for and winning academic freedom and annual research leave for librarians in our new Collective Agreement.

University libraries face many challenges, and I welcome them. But as we remake ourselves, collegiality and participation in governance remain crucial. If these means of empowerment are denied us, creative professional work can be pursued only with great perseverance and often at odds with superiors. Without an invigorating dialogue between management and staff, the life of the workplace feels like Adorno's desolate brief reprieve. In whatever form — group projects, teaching, research, writing or webbing — the work of librarians must be nourished and sustained by a listening, caring, collaborative leadership. Otherwise people dry up and the workplace is a dreary desert. In the worst situations, when a regime becomes absolutist, secretive and petulant, people are silenced, conversation becomes ventriloquism, morale plummets, and a baleful inertia predominates. Where staff are corralled and herded into passivity they stay safely and quietly preoccupied with routine tasks. This management style may work well on an alpaca ranch, but in libraries it does little to encourage achievement or profound reflection about our work and our role in the institution.

If there is indeed a blogging malaise amongst health librarians — and I hope we will all be evidence to the contrary — we should look to our organizational culture as the cause. Librarians blog for so many reasons: to participate in the information revolution, to communicate with like-minded colleagues, to grow in the profession, or simply to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind. Libraries that foster a culture of participative governance and collegiality are already revolutionary. They get people talking, contributing, reflecting, writing, laughing. I think the blogging future is here; it's just not distributed evenly.

Those who have laughter on their side have no need of proof.

I'm finished. I just wanted to end this with a happier quote from His Bleakness.

Am I a Librarian 2.0?

I don't hear my colleagues talk much about librarian competencies, even though we're surrounded by clinicians for whom competency is a serious career issue. Let alone the so-called Library 2.0 competencies, which some people I know view as a derisory notion. In the health library biz we are acutely aware of the preponderance of technology in our work, and we hustle as diligently as David Beckham with his personal trainer to keep up with the unceasing digital whirr.

Most of us, that is. We all know fellow workers who fit the adage "To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer." We anxiously observe them jabbing about with the mouse as they struggle with elementary software routines, stretching a bikini's worth of skill over their variously sized talents. Experiencing an in-service with a few of these types (or worse, asking for their help at the Reference Desk) is like a long wait for a delayed flight in Purgatory's airport lounge.


"Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it."
Once upon a time we breathed in the smell of beeswax and parchment in drafty scriptoria, and measured our competencies in terms of the cut of our quill pens and the quality of our uncials. Today we inhale digital oxygen and cut code. Library 2.0, as the borrowing from software marketing implies, represents a natural development from what went before. It is not just a smattering of adventitious embellishments. I know this in my html'd heart, but I don't yet see it given the significance it has for me in the elegantly worded charters, protocols, standards and guidelines of my profession.

Interested in measuring my own knowledge and performance against some standard (if I were younger this might be called ambition), I want to record in this post my web wanderings and stretch out a more generous swatch of spandex from the fabric of information I discovered.

I'll start by defining terms. In a CLA-approved contribution, Competencies for Change, Jennifer Slouter (Leddy Library, University of Windsor) defines competency as a "framework composed of the skills, knowledge and abilities required within a profession/industry to operate effectively and perform the necessary functions of the job. These can include personal attributes and learned skills." While acknowledging the importance of tech skills, she stresses (too much at the expense of technical mastery, IMHO) the importance of personal attributes such as flexibility and critical thinking. Yet it's hard not to agree with her conclusion: "While knowledge and skills must be learned as responsibilities or environments change, our ability to inhabit personal competencies and spin all iteratively is key to success in any library environment." Beautifully put and quite true. I am all for perky and prodigiously cultivated librarians. But if truth is beauty, why can't you get your hair done in the library and find an attractive personality to explain how to display your shared Google Reader feeds in your blog?


Between 1.0 and 2.0
The current Standards for Hospital Libraries (2002) and its 2004 revisions mention "evaluating new information technologies and assessing their application to library management and services" and "performing mediated searches of Internet and KBI resources." But for competencies they refer us to SLA's Competencies for Special Librarians of the 21st Century. Browsing through this document one comes across a few examples of information technology skils, such as creating a home page and linking it "to other sites of interest on the Internet." It all means well, I'm sure; but doesn't it sound just a bit dated?

Over at the UBC Health Library Wiki there is a fine list of core reference competencies for health librarians. It sticks pretty much to standard electronic resources, although there is a nice link to resources on blogs, podcasting and RSS feeds. But no mention of our Librarian^2.0.

Of course, for our Librarian^2.0 these competencies have developed from a foundation of fundamental computer skills such as those enumerated in Library Revolution. But I find such lists slightly embarrassing. The ability to type is not listed as a competency, because it is taken for granted. In the same way librarians shouldn't have to debate any longer about knowing how to copy and paste a word-processed sentence. Yeesh.

I'll also give a brief mention to a still relevant two-year-old list from The Shifted Librarian, 20 Technology Skills Every Librarian Should Have. No doubt there are other documents I have missed, but this gives me the lay of the land.

So what about today?

Librarian^2.0

Earlier this month the Cool Librarian asked how to overcome the growing divide between the techie camp and their fellow librarians. At the end of an entertaining and informative discussion of competencies her answer is a blunt: "Hell, I don't know." What we do know is that today something essential to librarianship is missing without an active knowledge of technology and the infinite variety of its practical implementation. That hole in your head had better be for jacking into cyberspace, or you should see a doctor.

In a recent post David Lee King prefers to refrain from calling them tech competencies at all, and I agree with him. It is impossible now to separate out the tech components of our work, which combine with our intellectual labour into an imbricated whole.

David provides a comprehensive list of skills:

Specific 2.0 skills:

• write and post to a blog
• add photos and videos to a blog post
• embed a widget into blogs and social networking accounts (like MySpace)
• social network knowledge - basic understanding of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. and the ability to explain them to others
• create, upload and edit photos, short videos, podcasts, and screencasts
• use IM in different forms
• use and explain rss and rss readers to others
• send and read sms text messages
• edit an avatar’s appearance
• basic console gaming skills (multiple formats preferred)
• ability to do basic HTML editing - an understanding of (X)HTML and CSS
• know how to pick up a new device (mp3 player, mobile phone, etc) and figure out how to use it
• the ability to assess and learn the basics of a new digital service or tool within 15 minutes of fiddling around with it

“Big Picture” 2.0 skills:

• understand how everything above works in a library setting
• understand how everything above complements a physical, traditional library
• and most importantly - the ability to tell the library’s story, through various media - writing, photography, audio, and video

Suggestions from commenters:

• ability to understand the difference between a dynamic URL and an permanent URL
• knowledge of OpenURL
• basic understanding of social bookmarking (e.g., del.icio.us) and citation management tools (RefWorks, Zotero)
• awareness of grey literature and the invisible web

Of course, a Librarian^2.0 is also comfortable with at least one operating system and a wide range of software. A key to "twoness" in my opinion is the ability to "conduct" a suite of applications, both web and non-web, to achieve professional goals and objectives.

The 13 Things

Now compare all this to "The 13 Things" from the University of Michigan. Actually consisting of about ten distinct competencies, this list is looking for a catchier title. The competencies are tied in to workshops being offered this summer to participating librarians:

Blogs & RSS
1) Create a blog using MBlog or another blogging platform.
2) Set up an account on Google Reader (or another feed reader of your choice) and subscribe to two library-related and one non-library-related blog via their feeds.

Social Tagging
3) Create a del.icio.us account (link to it from your blog post). Post (and tag!) three URLs related to Web/Library 2.0.
4) Create a flickr account (link to it from your blog post). Join the MLibrary2.0 group. Explore flickr and add a few pictures to your favorites.

Social Networking
5) Create a Facebook account and join the MLibrary2.0 Facebook group.
6) Consider how the library could use Facebook for outreach or for reference; make a wall or discussion post about your thoughts in the MLibrary2.0 group.

Next Generation OPACs
7) Play with one of the Next Generation OPACs. Do a variety of searches and explore features not available in a traditional catalog. Make comments in your blog about your experience.
8) Perform a set of searches in at least three of the Next Generation OPACs. Make a blog entry about your experience. Compare the features, capabilities and usability of the interfaces and make a prioritized list of the features you would most like to see in Mirlyn.

Podcasting & YouTube
9) Find & subscribe to three podcasts you are interested in using iTunes, Google Reader, or another program.
10) Create a YouTube account. Find a library-related video and add it to your favorites. Embed this video in an entry in your blog.

Firefox Extensions
11) Install LibX and Zotero for Firefox on your home or work computer.
12) Use LibX to locate a book/article that is of interest to you, and use Zotero to save it to your personal library. Extra credit for adding tags.

Wrap-up by blogging the experience and maintaining the blog
13) In your blog, reflect on your experiences with Web/Library 2.0 and what you have learned. Consider keeping your blog alive past the 13 things by continuing to post your thoughts on libraries.

I liked Michigan's inclusion of next-generation collaborative catalogues, like LibraryThing. It's a good thing they didn't add a Thing on setting up a SecondLife account, because, the thing is, I don't see the point of SecondLife ... yet. I lose marks because I have yet to embed a video in a blog post; and perhaps because I'm Canadian I'm leery of writing on someone's Facebook wall. It seems somehow intrusive, even illicit. But then, Canadians tend to have an exaggerated idea of our own unimportance. And finally, will someone please tell me what the point of Twitter is?

I'm really pleased to see a library take a systematic approach to fostering Librarian^2.0 competencies. That means a lot of workshops, a lot of earnest exchanges in the Tim Horton's line-up, a lot of lunch chat. It means collaboration and cooperation, a team environment, and what academics like to call collegiality. In Health Library 2.0 what would we add to the above lists? Perhaps third-party PubMed tools and knowledge of medical wikis. I'm looking forward to 3.0 and 4.0, which I'm sure are just around the virtual corner.


"I'm not young enough to know everything." (J.M Barrie)
From all these Librarian^2.0 competencies I now have a framework I can build on. It has taken a while for me to develop the skills that most fourteen-year-olds seem to acquire automatically along with puberty and pimples. It's not easy to keep up with the young ones, who never seem to mistake their CSS for RSS, always know how to find something cool at bittorrent sites, and drink their code straight. Me, I can't even think straight. But it's a great time to be a librarian.