This Book Is Overdue! Read online

  “They’re into it. And we don’t get it,” said Hay.

  Almost a year after the migration, Hay reported to the library board that a number of the catalog issues that bedeviled the system, including the inexplicably vanishing holds, could not be blamed on technology. “In many cases, these issues were traced back to personnel/input problems and not direct system problems,” he said. There was a little explosive charge behind his carefully chosen words. The holds were not mysteriously disappearing because the Sirsi system screwed up and the IT department failed to diagnose the problem, and they didn’t stem from innocent user error or inadequate training. Rather, it seemed, a few librarians had been going into the computerized hold queues and deleting requests, moving their own names up the waiting list to claim the hot items for themselves.

  The sweethearts of free culture, the helpmates of the mind, this selfless profession turned out to harbor individuals who couldn’t wait their turn to consume Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. Or was it the BBC version of Sense and Sensibility that drove them mad with longing, mad enough to forget their ethical principles and vows to serve the public? Whatever it was, the desire for it had thrown a low-tech wrench into the system’s $787,000 catalog.

  My smart, conscientious, friendly librarians slammed the drawer on those grasping fingers that had uncharacteristically crept out from behind the circulation desk. The furious directors disciplined the perps and drew up a document articulating their ethical expectations for every library employee, including the high school pages, the book shelvers. I never did learn what constituted discipline for renegade librarians, though I didn’t spot anybody with brands or burns or dislocated thumbs. More than any group I can think of, librarians are identified with their profession, and the laughs and jeers don’t stop when some stickler tries to collect a dead person’s fine. So this transgression was dealt with quietly. It was all I could do to get one of the directors to confirm it. “Most of us are honest,” she began, before admitting that, “yes, a couple librarians were jumping their relatives ahead of other holds for new DVDs. And everyone thought we had a software bug, and was blaming the IT guys.”

  Hay shrugged it off; he didn’t want to discuss it. His two deputies shook their heads. Their competence had been called into question, but what can you do? This migration had been a perfect storm of screwups.

  For nearly a year, I had struggled whenever the librarians tried to explain their circulation challenges, or the IT people tried to explain the need for reindexing, the “junk” they said librarians had thrown in “the volume fields” that messed up the searches, beating my head against the language of libraries and computers. But here was a culprit I understood. I ran home and danced around the table, singing, “Guess what! You know the screwed-up catalog? The one driving everyone nuts? You know what caused the last bug? Greedy librarians!” Obviously, the stress had affected me, too.

  Of course most librarians are honest; that’s one reason it took so long to figure out what was wrong. The point is, libraries that share an IT department share a nerve center, and few can afford to stand alone these days. A little action in one place radiates through the whole system.

  And let’s put it in perspective. In 2009, the New York Public Library merged the separate catalogs of its research and circulating libraries—eight million records all together—into one. Harried librarians there were coping with irate patrons, lost holds, and checkout lines that snaked out the library doors. A librarian observing the disruption summed it up: “There is no such thing as a smooth conversion.”

  But back in 2007, the Westchester librarian just trying to do her job pulled out her “Adventures in Sirsi-land” binder, full of memos from headquarters wishing her a “Happy Gloomy Morning” or exhorting her to “smile a lot and forgive fines.” She wanted the online catalog to work, that’s all. Why couldn’t the IT department make that happen? And what was with Hay? “Look,” she said, “he actually wrote, ‘I’m going to have a cigarette to calm down.’ Do you believe that?”

  Was he taunting her? It was almost as if they were married, and divorce was in the air.

  And in a sense they were married, the librarians and the IT department—for better or worse, for richer or poorer…in technological trauma or robust cyber health.

  4.

  THE BLOG PEOPLE

  Is it any wonder the whispering behind the library staff doors has turned into exclamations on the Internet? They can’t keep this stuff to themselves.

  They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy—for their patrons and themselves. They disappeared into their staff rooms and we heard…nothing—no buzz of gossip, no shrieks of laughter. We didn’t even hear the squeaks from their shoes.

  Library science has always been a discreet profession. Have you ever had a librarian confide her pain or personal heartache while on the job? Not likely. Once I asked a reference librarian of the slightly chilly ilk where to find the graphic novels. I was looking for a copy of Maus. “Oh!” she said, her face lighting up. “I love that book.” (Someday, I will stop being surprised at all the things librarians read; they’ll read anything.) Then she took me to the rumpled teen corner of the library, found Maus, and placed it in my hands with a blessing. “I hope you love it, too.” I looked back on decades of patronage and realized that this was the most a librarian had ever revealed about herself in a professional exchange.

  Librarians were the last people I’d expect to make noise on a social network. And yet, in the last decade or so, librarians took to blogging with a vengeance. Blogs turned out to be a natural medium for these inveterate browsers and bibliographers to post their links. They were useful catch-alls for sharing reviews and discoveries. They were places to reflect on your work and speculate about the future, to gossip and rant. You could swear freely and anonymously on the Internet; the wilder your personality and the more scathing your satire, the more readers you attracted. Unedited and unmonitored, blogs represented a kind of free expression that librarians traditionally supported and celebrated, but had rarely taken the opportunity to practice.

  The computers that carried the libraries’ catalogs and linked them to the Internet were also do-it-yourself publishing centers. With the rise of easy-to-use blogging software, free hosting sites, and a built-in readership—colleagues conscientiously paying attention to the new medium and looking for sites to visit on the Web—people didn’t need programming skills to reach an audience. They simply needed things to say, and librarians, as it happens, were cauldrons of previously unexpressed passions.

  There are upward of 150,000 librarians in this country, so the stampede to blogging had an impact. “They are multiplying like rabbits,” librarian Rory Litwin wrote in 2002 in a bit of a panic over the proliferation of the “Wild Librarian” websites. Lists of the Top Ten Librarian Blogs morphed into the Top Fifty, and barely scratched the surface at that. Most of the writers were talking to each other, but since they were talking on the World Wide Web, there was nothing to stop outsiders from reading and laughing over their shoulders, picking up hot information and technology tips. It was easy to eavesdrop on the librarians.

  The ranting, mocking model prevailed. “Why you should get on your knees and worship a librarian” was the banner on the Librarian Avenger’s home page, but it could have served for most of them. Every possible distinguishing feature attached itself to the title Librarian and marked a blog home on the Web. Bunless, Depraved, Disorganized, Eclectic, Foxy, Gypsy, and Lipstick Librarians joined Free Range, Scattered, and Shifted Librarians in the biblioblogosphere, as librarians called their corner of the Web. And then there were the librarian bloggers who let off steam that seemed to have built up since the Steam Age: The Annoyed Librarian, The Effing Librarian, Librarian’s Rant, Miss Information, The Obnoxious Librarian from Hades, Shhhh!!, and, with a mission explicitly articulated to document the assholic behavior of patrons, supervisors
, and coworkers, the baddest-named blog of all, The Society for Librarians Who Say Motherfucker. Yes, there were librarians who called their patrons mofos behind their backs. The Dutch librarian Dennie Heye created an obnoxious librarian alter-ego to vent and entertain; his Obnoxious Librarian from Hades, who longed for the days when librarians used to chain books to the stacks, called library users “lusers.” (And this guy had been named the European Special Library Association’s 2008 Information Professional of the Year.)

  There were straight blogs that spread news about a library’s services, acquisitions, and events, and blogs that did the same job with attitude, like Pimp My Library. The 2.0 librarian bloggers wrote about the intersection of libraries and technology and beat the drum for networked information and technical literacy: Info Babe, InfoFetishist, Information Wants to Be Free. In less than a decade, this silent profession turned clamorous. Open, casual, approachable, dedicated to demystifying technology and networked to the eyeballs, the bloggers became the public face of the twenty-first-century librarian. And the “blog people,” as library leader and occasional grump Michael Gorman scornfully called them, became the celebrities of the librarian world.

  Seriously

  People serious about the future of librarianship and their role in it launched serious blogs, minus the effing-studded posts. Some attended a workshop called “Blogging for Professional Development”—and then they started blogs. The drumbeat urging librarians to blog came in the form of cheerful encouragement (“having a blog shows you have a constructive online presence…. A blog is also a good thing to list on your business card…. It feels great to be part of the community…sharing ideas and promoting the field”—advice from The Inspired Library School Student) as well as short, free, do-it-yourself courses, developed by smart librarians and posted for their colleagues (or anyone) to learn the new tools of the social web.

  Young, eager computer geeks took their first steps into the library profession by blogging. “So, how did I become a librarian?” wrote Lichen Rancourt, a tech whiz in her thirties. “Is it too smoochy to say I think I always was one? My mom is a librarian…I loved computers; it just kind of made sense.” She attended an information science conference in 2005 and was struck by lightning. “Jenny and Michael opened doors that day for me. I came home and started a blog.”

  Everybody is first-name familiar in blogland. Fortunately, I had read enough librarian posts to know immediately which Jenny and Michael she was referring to, though Lichen helpfully linked both names to their websites. There were several semifamous librarians named Michael, but this one was young ponytailed Michael Stephens, an assistant professor at Dominican University in Illinois whose blog Tame the Web blended technological savvy and human enthusiasm. Jenny was Jenny Levine, one of the earliest of the librarian bloggers and a proponent of gaming in libraries. (At conferences, Jenny would set up a stand in the lobby and show librarians how to play tennis on the Wii. The first thing I saw, arriving at more than one library convention, was the laid-back Jenny and a couple of librarians whacking at the air in front of their gaming screens.) The ALA hired Jenny in 2006, and she has been developing digital initiatives. Now she has lit another beacon on the frontier: her ALA CONNECT, a social network for librarians, lets the profession communicate and collaborate and keep records of their committee meetings in one online hive.

  I pictured the dynamic, motormouth Michael prowling the stage, the laconic, rumpled Jenny clicking the mouse and flashing pictures on the screen behind him, both wearing jeans and flannel shirts, putting the tools of the trade into Lichen’s hands with encouraging smiles. They were dream recruiters for library school. Almost anyone who spent time skipping around librarian blogs or attending conventions would know about these two engaging proponents of Library 2.0. Many would also know Lichen, who had been fomenting technological revolution since that fateful day at the conference; she has since earned her library degree and gone on to direct technology at the Mansfield Public Library in New Hampshire and also write write experimental software.

  Dip into any of the serious 2.0 librarian blogs and you’ll fall into this network of smart, young, articulate coders and catalogers, with the temperament to wade into the rough-and-tumble Internet and a mission to light a path through the maze. In Remaining Relevant, for instance, Lichen linked her two inspirations, the conference that changed her life (complete with podcasts of Jenny and Michael’s presentations) and the online university and degree program she subsequently enrolled in. You could follow in Lichen’s footsteps, and if you, too, were inspired, she made it easy for you to instantly register for library school. Or the excellent Librarian in Black (“resources and discussions for the ‘tech-librarian-by-default’ among us”) would lead you to sites like LibraryThing, where you could become your own librarian and create an electronic record of your own books and music. Too much trouble to enter the titles by hand? Free Range Librarian reviewed LibraryThing’s fifteen-dollar scanner, which swept over your books and cataloged them automatically. Librarians, in short, were swarming the Web, exploring and mapping it, while linking readers to the shiny, or useful, or fascinating things they found along the way.

  P.S. Don’t worry about that smoochy in Lichen’s post. Lichen Rancourt was hardly the mushy type—“Curse the shoddy wifi,” she tweeted during one library conference; “how is this a problem at every single conference? Network peeps, is it really that hard?”—so her post “Is it too smoochy to say I think I always was [a librarian]?” should be read with a wink. Yes, librarians used punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they’d wear it out.

  One of the goals of Library 2.0 was to bridge the distance between the expert librarians and us, the public. Blogs made librarians accessible from anywhere. We could follow them virtually into their staff rooms; we could even follow them home.

  Michael Stephens wrote his Ph.D. dissertation about blogging librarians; that’s how much he believed in their power to disseminate information and create community. Occasionally, he admitted, his exposure on the Web seemed to invite a sort of creepy familiarity. In Tame the Web, he recalled the night a strange young woman called him via video-chat, in the hope that, because he had written about his Mac, he could help fix hers (he tried, unsuccessfully). On another occasion, he wrote, “I was floating on my floatie in the middle of Spider Lake on a HOT day when two kayaks approach. ‘Hello,’ says the younger of the two fellows…. ‘Are you the guy that has all the pictures up on the web of Balsam Circle?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, glancing around and feeling suddenly vulnerable. ‘I googled Balsam Circle and Spider Lake and found all your pictures. We wanted to FIND YOU.’” They were stalkers, but benign ones. “We chitchat when they pass by in the mornings now,” Michael reported.

  This was certainly a different kind of librarian from the ones planted behind the reference desk. Michael was in a bathing suit—on a floatie—his labeled pictures out there on the Web where anyone could find them. This willingness to be found, not just online but also out in the field, in his own pond, took a certain amount of courage and faith in the good intentions of his public.

  Jessamyn West started her blog, librarian.net, back in 1997 as a way to keep her mom informed about what she was doing, and from the start she was an open book, generously posting about nine different ways readers could contact her directly. She linked her professional blog with her personal blog, jessamyn.com, where she actually gave the world directions to her home in Vermont. “Pretty much everyone’s welcome, with some notice, including decently behaved pets and kids,” she declared. “The place is hell on the allergic, bring your meds…. I cannot stress enough that there is nothing to do out here in many conventional senses. Please come prepared to amuse yourself, or amuse me…. It always helps to bring food, beer or board games. If you are here more than three days, I’ll put you to work.” Personally, I found it hard to fathom this openness—I fr
eaked when I learned Google maps linked directions to my house with my address—but the combination of blunt honesty and post-hippie friendliness suited Jessamyn’s style as a librarian and personified the open Web.

  It also gave those of us with questions another place to go. If our neighborhood librarians were off duty, we could always find Michael or Jessamyn or one of the other librarians floating on the Web. Or we could consult the online resources they had assembled, like the program “Five Weeks to a Social Library” launched by five tech-savvy librarians, which brought me up to speed on wikis and Flickr, or Jessamyn’s homemade video called “Ubuntu @ the Library.” This was a Keystone Kops–style romp set to a spirited Cajun number, showing Jessamyn installing, with ease, the Ubuntu open-source operating system on an old computer donated to one of the rural Vermont libraries where she works. At some point Jessamyn brought her adorable face up close to the camera and chatted while waiting for the system to load on the old computer. Then she showed us all the games and other features before the BeauSoleil soundtrack propelled her into a happy closing frenzy. The YouTube iteration of her video was viewed well over 100,000 times. That’s stardom in the library world, and inspiration, too; how many old computers have been revived because of her example?

  K. G. (Karen) Schneider calls herself “the world’s oldest millennial”—she’s barely fifty, but most of the bloggers and geek librarians are at least one decade, if not three decades, younger. Since 2003, she has been posting high-tech commentary, news about her literary work, and dispatches on daily life with her cats and the woman she refers to as “mrs. kgs” on her blog, Free Range Librarian. Her prose has a real voice, breezily familiar, even playful. “If you want to do one thing for me, your favorite gay person (I am your favorite, right?) please view and share Prop 8: The Musical starring Jack Black.” Like the rest of the 2.0 librarians, she traveled frequently from her home in Tallahassee to speak at library conferences, and published her personal schedule so people could locate her, even when she was offstage: “1:30—4 Exhibits (walking with a friend),” she detailed, or “11:00 p.m. ALA Midwinter After Hours, Moriarty’s Irish Pub…(tentative—that’s awfully late).”