Mind the Generation Gap: Millennials and Boomers in the Library Workplace

As editor of On My Mind, I wanted to introduce myself and let you, the reader, know a little bit about what I intend this column to be. Primarily, I want it to be a venue for you to write about anything that has been bugging you or that you think needs to be said. This is an opinion column so please share your opinion. Maybe you want to talk about what you wished you had learned in library school. Or, perhaps you have a bone to pick with people who rely too much on using statistics in their weeding of books from the library's shelves. Whether the majority of librarians hold your opinion or not, I will try to give you a venue to express your thoughts. Also, this column is intended to be informal; feel free to use the first person. That does not mean that you cannot or should not back up statements you make with research. Please do. It does mean that personal anecdotes and stories are encouraged and make for a more interesting read. Finally, inquiries into writing for this column should be directed to me via e-mail. You will get a timely response. –Eric Jennings     

IFLA and other International Library Associations,Institutions and Organizations

Column Editor's Notes

This workforce column, guest written by Jill Mierke, evokes memories of the saying, you are not alone. The challenges of workforce and workplace leadership for any library chief executive officer are many and varied. We come to those roles usually as experienced (if not seasoned) professionals, but we do not always have the theoretical grounding and specific professional practice experience a dedicated human resources professional might bring to the organization. A Master's in library and information sciences qualification is no guarantee that you will have the requite knowledge, skills, experience, and abilities to be a good people manager or a strategic leader of the library workforce. This article paints a compelling picture of what success for library human resource management and leadership can look like, through the lens of an experienced and seasoned human resources professional. Recent workforce research is telling us there are many roles within our libraries that are now being successfully filled by “other” professionals. In our ever changing and dynamic information landscape, the human resources strategic advisory role is one of them.

As always, I invite further contributions to our ongoing discussion! Please submit articles for this column to the editor at vicki.williamson@usask.ca     

Our words,our story: a textual analysis of articles published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association/Journal of the Medical Library Association from 1961 to 2010

Purpose:

This lecture explores changes in the medical library profession over the last fifty years, as revealed by individual word usage in a body of literature.

Methods:

I downloaded articles published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association and Journal of the Medical Library Association between 1961 and 2000 to create an electronic corpus and tracked annual frequency of individual word usage. I used frequency sparklines of words, matching one of four archetypal shapes (level, rise, fall, and rise-and-fall) to identify significant words.

Results:

Most significant words fell into the categories of environment, management, technology, and research. Based on word usage changes, the following trends are revealed: Compared to 1961, today''s medical librarians are more concerned with digital information, not physical packages. We prefer information to be evidence-based. We focus more on health than medicine. We are reaching out to new constituents, sometimes leaving our building to do so. Teaching has become important for us. We run our libraries more like businesses, using constantly changing technology. We are publishing more research articles.

Conclusions:

Although these words were chosen by individual authors to tell their particular stories, in the aggregate, our words reveal our story of change in our profession.The Janet Doe Lecture on the history or philosophy of medical librarianship: I will warn you right now that you will get very little philosophy out of me today, for two reasons. First, my predecessor T. Scott Plutchak, AHIP, was a philosophy major, and I knew that a zoology major like myself could not compete with that. Second, “philosophy” in many Janet Doe lectures is actually a strong personal viewpoint of medical librarianship—what it is or what it should be. I do collection development, where things change so much and so rapidly that I have not had time to develop a strong viewpoint like many of my Doe predecessors. Like most of my collection development colleagues, I''m just trying to survive day to day. That tends to create a very pragmatic attitude. If I believe in anything strongly, it is that I believe I''ll have another cookie.Without philosophy, I am left with history. And here I will echo the complaint of many Doe lecturers by stating that I have a severe lack of historical research skills. I became painfully aware of this lack as I read previous Doe Lectures, such as David Kronick''s 1980 lecture 1. Kronick was a true scholar, with a doctorate in librarianship. We honor him to this day with the Medical Library Association''s (MLA''s) David A. Kronick Traveling Fellowship. In his Doe Lecture, Kronick quoted H. Curtis Wright''s “The Oral Antecedents of Greek Librarianship,” Francis Bacon, and the fifteenth-century Abbot Johannes Trimethius. In contrast, later in this speech, I will quote the Talking Heads.While I am totally unqualified for traditional historical research, that still leaves informal, or personal, history. Although I am old enough to be in my anecdotage, I just do not have many interesting stories to tell. And as Thomas Basler, FMLA, told us in his 2008 Doe Lecture, there are no more giants. While I met some of those giants, I did not know them, and I certainly do not have any stories to tell about them. I suppose I could tell stories about some of the taller than average individuals I have met in my career, but that does not sound very exciting.     

The archival sliver: Power, memory, and archives in South Africa

Far from being a simple reflection of reality, archives are constructed windows into personal and collective processes. They at once express and are instruments of prevailing relations of power. Verne Harris makes these arguments through an account of archives and archivists in the context of South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. The account is deliberately shaped around three themes — race, power, and public records. While he concedes that the constructedness of memory and the dimension of power are most obvious in the extreme circumstances of oppression and rapid transition to democracy, he argues that these are realities informing archives in all circumstances. He makes an appeal to archivists to enchant their work by engaging these realities and by turning always towards the call of and for justice. This essay draws heavily on four articles published previously by me: “Towards a Culture of Transparency: Public Rights of Access to Official Records in South Africa”,American Archivist 57.4 (1994); “Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public Archives and Society in Transition, 1990–1996”,Archivaria 42 (1996); “Transforming Discourse and Legislation: A Perspective on South Africa's New National Archives Act”,ACARM Newsletter 18 (1996); and “Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa”,Archivaria 44 (1997). I am grateful to Ethel Kriger (National Archives of South Africa) and Tim Nuttall (University of Natal) for offering sometimes tough comment on an early draft of the essay. I remain, of course, fully responsible for the final text. I presented a version of it in the “Refiguring the Archive” seminar series, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, October 1998. That version was published in revised form in Carolyn Hamilton et al.,Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002).     

Colonial archives and the arts of governance

Anthropologists engaged in post-colonial studies are increasingly adopting an historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain more an extractive than an ethnographic one. Documents are thus still invoked piecemeal to confirm the colonial invention of certain practices or to underscore cultural claims, silent. Yet such mining of thecontent of government commissions, reports, and other archival sources rarely pays attention to their peculiar placement andform. Scholars need to move from archive-assource to archive-as-subject. This article, using document production in the Dutch East Indies as an illustration, argues that scholars should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography. This requires a sustained engagement with archives as cultural agents of “fact” production, of taxonomies in the making, and of state authority. What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power.     

基于Human Library的外语学习活动

Human Library是一种新颖的基于对话的教育方法。在Human Library中,HumanBook是由人充当的。人在读书的同时,"书"也在读人。在经验分享上,Human Book具有开放性。只要基本设施具备,对活动的主办者没有限制。Human Library的发展历程表明,将Hu-man Library的理念应用到学生的外语学习中是完全可行的。最后以日语为例提出了一种基于Human Library的外语学习模式。     

Crossing the Channel: Publishing Translated German Fiction in the UK

In a review of Hans Fallada’s novel Alone in Berlin—finally translated into English after 62 years—Sam Jordison stated, “[I]t’s an important book that no English writer could have written—and so another resounding argument for the importance of taking in translations. It makes me wonder what else we’ve been missing.” Translated fiction plays a minimal role in the UK. Scholars are increasingly directing their attention towards this deficit. This paper will consider the culture of translation in the UK and Ireland, with a particular focus on translated German fiction.

     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

Afterglow: Conceptions of record and evidence in archival discourse

In the last ten years, influential voices within and on the periphery of the record keeping community have succeeded in establishing the preservation of “evidence” as the governing purpose of contemporary archival theory and methods development. Afterglow offers a critique of the concept of evidence in archival discourse. Its main contention is that one can put records into evidence; one cannot set out to put evidence into records. The argument rests on the following assertions: (1) current discussions of evidence rest on a blindness to certain contradictions embedded in claims that record keeping principally involves evidence keeping, or “evidence management”; (2) a politics of temporality, under which an interplay of disciplinary knowledge claims and professional interest is discernible, helps to account for the contemporary rhetoric describing the relationship between “record” and “evidence”, and (3) the late-twentieth century legal, political, and cultural climate, along with the technological environment, explain the increasing prominence of “evidence” in these knowledge claims and professional ambitions. The essay concludes with recommendations for addressing these issues. Thanks go to Terry Cook, Visiting Professor in the Archival Studies Programme, Department of History, University of Manitoba, and co-editor of this series of essays, for his close reading and detailed comments on this essay. Particularly invaluable was his knowledge of historical and contemporary archival thinking on the notion of evidence.     

Discussion forum: Federal records and archives

Ten years of experience in working with Federal records and archives has shown me that many Federal employees, as well as those using Federal records and archives, do not fully understand the terms “permanent records” and “archives,” nor can they, most often, provide an adequate definition of a Federal record. This article will try to clarify what Federal records, permanent records, and archives are. It addresses who creates and maintains them, who determines which records become archives, and some of the legal issues relating to records and access to them.     

Understanding the context of records creation and use: ‘Hard’ versus ‘soft’ approaches to records management

Current records management methodologies and practices suffer from an inadequate understanding of the ‘human activity systems’ where records managers operate as ‘mediators’ between a number of complex and interacting factors. Although the records management and archival literature recognizes that managing the active life of the records is fundamental to their survival as meaningful evidence of activities, the context where the records are made, captured, used, and selectively retained is not explored in depth. In particular, the various standards, models, and functional requirement lists, which occupy a vast portion of that literature, especially in relation to electronic records, do not seem to be capable of framing records-related ‘problems’ in ways that account for their dynamic and multiform nature. This paper introduces the idea that alternative, ‘softer’ approaches to the analysis of organizational functions, structures, agents, and artifacts may usefully complement the ‘hard’, engineering-like approaches typically drawn on by information and records specialists. Three interrelated theoretical and methodological frameworks—namely, Soft Systems Methodology, Adaptive Structuration Theory, and Genre Theory—are discussed, with the purpose of highlighting their contributions to our understanding of the records context.     

Building an Oral History Program to Serve Your Community北大核心CSSCI

Thank you so much for having me with you today.I want to extend a special thank you to the Evergreen Education Foundation,the National Library of China,and the Department of Information Management of Peking University for hosting this wonderful conference.I am honored to be able to speak with you today and look forward to     

Innovation is Iteration: Thinking Next to the Box

An account of the process of constant experimentation that drives our industry-leading newsletters and web site; the lessons behind our entrepreneurial experiences that should be meaningful to many within book publishing; and suggestions for how publishers of all sizes can employ a similar mindset in getting closer to readers and leveraging their natural assets for success in today’s rapidly changing marketplace. This paper was presented during the “Making Information Pay 2008” conference organized by the Book Industry Study Group, as a different kind of text as far as I am concerned than an essay. What I actually said the day of the presentation was undoubtedly somewhat different than what is written here.     

Leadership Reflections: It is Not About the Perks

Abstract

Our guest columnist is Karl Bridges who has served in a variety of leadership roles in academic libraries. I have gotten to know Karl over the past few years as he was asked to serve in an interim dean role and then hired into the permanent dean positions. At the time, I was at the University of Wyoming and serving as a leader in sparsely populated state where everyone knows your name. Western leaders have to form a tight bond – there are fewer of us and the distances are great. But regardless of geographical situations, leaders need and depend on peer networks that provide a safe space for frank conversations and sharing ideas that help all libraries achieve their goals. Karl has dealt with changing university leadership, library transformations, and dire budget situations. Well, pretty much what every library leader must face. Despite these challenges, library leaders have an opportunity to make a real difference. Karl draws upon his years of experience to provide a thought piece about library leadership noting the complexity, the importance of leadership, and the real joy of making a difference in someone’s life. I hope you enjoy this raw look at leadership and that it reminds you of the purpose of leadership.     

Among the Sensuous: Listening to Film,Listening to the Philippines

In this paper, I argue that listening to a film is as significant as watching it; in spite of what seems like a formalist argument, I examine in what ways such an approach intervenes in the production of knowledge around Philippine history and Filipina/o bodies. In Kidlat Tahimik's film, Mababangong Bangungot, an overprivileging of the visual aids and abets the film's masculinist nationalism, despite the best efforts of critics to find a “third term.” That third term just might come from listening to the film, which delivers its own kind of postcolonial and feminist critique, one which impacts how we think about contemporary communication and cultural studies.     

Programs for Posterity

This essay explores the diverse field of audio records manufactured as tie-ins to popular American radio programs of the postwar period. Little has been written on such products as meaningful artifacts of consumption during any phase in broadcasting history. Yet radio records proved especially meaningful to customers in the 1940s and 1950s, as they offered a highly convenient way to upend rigid transmission schedules and program ephemerality. Here, I focus on spoken word radio albums that promised listeners important broadcast knowledge stored for ‘posterity’ on disk. Phonograph companies like Columbia banked on consumer interest in replay of these programs to sell radio records as technologies of permanence and documents with unparalleled historical and cultural value. I analyze program-to-record case studies like You Are There (1949) and The Quick and the Dead (1951) to illustrate how producers lay claim to historical authenticity via capturing, recording, or releasing transient moments on records.     

From work to text to document

The defining trope for the humanities in the last 30 years has been typified by the move from “work” to “text.” The signature text defining this move has been Roland Barthes seminal essay, “From Work to Text.” But the current move in library, archival and information studies toward the “document” as the key term offers challenges for contemporary humanities research. In making our own movement from work to text to document, we can explicate fully the complexity of conducting archival humanistic research within disciplinary and institutional contexts in the twenty-first century. This essay calls for a complex perspective, one that demands that we understand the raw materials of scholarship are processed by disciplines, by institutions, and by the work of the scholar. When we understand our materials as constrained by disciplines, we understand them as “works.” When we understand them as constrained by the institutions of memory that preserve and grant access to them, we understand them as “documents.” And when we understand them as the ground for our own interpretive activity, we understand them as “texts.” When we understand that humanistic scholarship requires an awareness of all three perspectives simultaneously (an understanding demonstrated by case studies in historical studies of the discipline of rhetoric), we will be ready for a richer historical scholarship as well as a richer collaboration between humanists and archivists.     

Sleeping giants: towards an understanding of the needs of deaf people

^* Fictitious names have been used to protect these individuals.
was pre-lingually deaf, from three generations of deaf people. Today she is outgoing and successful in her job, and a ready communicator with everyone, deaf and hearing alike. Her communicating idioms, with both groups, are rich. She benefited from the twin forces in her childhood of family (all her family were highly attuned to the non-verbal idioms of communication) and one grandmother (who was hearning, and who provided what came to be seen as teh key intervening role at that time in Joan's development of a second language, the idiom of spoken English). Her own intellectual drive was the final component in a combination of motivating influences which led her to respond to both the financial and social necessities to gain verbal codes, leading to an ability to read and to understand what she read. She remains totally deaf and she knows that her speaking voice is not understood by strangers. Frank ^{* *} Fictitious names have been used to protect these individuals.
is a regular reader of newspapers, at least, that's what you would think if you saw him regularly. He does know certain words (or rather parts of words) and he constructs a story from his understanding of whatever catches his eye. At his job, which he does with skill, he is confident and earns the trust of colleagues and superiors. He is, however, illiterate. He knows that if he is seen to be ‘reading’ he will sustain the image he has created that he can read: he acts like a literate person. He is confident and competent in what he knows, which is enough for the regular and recurring nature of the tasks he is asked to perform in his job. He is knowledgeable and defensive about that knowledge but as a accepted at work, but any change or new demand, print-based, would sweep away his precarious confidence and, probably along with that, his job.