Monthly Archives: March 2009

I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane

By IRIS Posted on by

At the very last minute, I decided to fly out to DC (well, Crystal City, actually, which is the travel equivalent of buying a vinyl rather than a leather couch). The chance to hang out with a whole bunch of incredibly cool librarians, talk about whatever comes to mind, and do so without registering for an actual conference just doesn’t come around all that often for me, so I’m pretty thrilled.

Actually, in my better moments I’m thrilled. I think of seeing some of my best friends in the world, of joking and being serious, of eating out, and of generally doing whatever seems best to do at the time, and these things seem very very good. Then I remember that doing this requires that I do unpleasant things like pack and figure out logistics and in many other small ways step beyond my comfort zone, my routine. These things feel much less good. In my worse moments these things are nearly enough to make me question the whole prospect of the trip.

This is a pretty typical set of emotions before I travel, though, so I’m not surprised. The day before the trip I always wish I’d just decided to stay home. But then I get to the airport, through security, and up to the gate. I sit down to wait for boarding, and suddenly everything seems better. At that point all the preparations over which I have any control are done and all I have to do is go with the flow. At that point, I can blend into an anonymous crowd and watch people or daydream or read or do whatever comes to mind. At that point, the trip finally starts to feel like a good idea.

I’m looking forward to that moment. And this time I’m particularly looking forward to what comes after I reach Crystal City since I’ll get to meet some new people and reunite with some of the people who know me best. And I can’t wait to experience my very first LobbyCon.

So all in all, things are going well. And now I’ll concentrate on the glorious potential of this trip as I go out and run some errands and then pack.

Charitable Writing

By IRIS Posted on by

A couple of years ago Meredith Farkas wrote a post in which she introduced Josh Neff’s phrase “charitable reading” to the library blogosphere. The phrase is a good one, so it has bubbled up from time to time over the years. Essentially it means “read what people write and assume that those people meant well and that they are not stupid.” Granted, occasionally people don’t mean well, and sometimes they are stupid, but the idea is not to have those as your baseline assumptions.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last several months (two years is an eternity in blog years but not very long in human years, so I’m allowed to still be thinking about this, right?), and I think that this is only half of what makes for productive written discussion. The other half is Charitable Writing: assume that your audience is not stupid, that they mean well, that they are probably trying to do the best they can or think carefully or otherwise conduct themselves well, and that they wouldn’t be reading and interacting with you if they didn’t want to.

Lately I’ve found myself unsubscribing from blogs and twitter feeds that, even though they have potentially useful content, present ideas in ways that sound condescending. Somehow that tone of writing screams “I’m pretty sure I’m smarter than you!” so loudly that it drowns out the calm murmur of the authors’ interesting ideas. This tone forces to me to work far harder at Charitable Reading than feels fair. It eventually wears me out. And so I unsubscribe and trust that others will point me toward the truly important posts.

Charitable Reading is hard. I fail at it frequently. But I think Charitable Writing is even harder because it it requires that authors see beyond the facts that they’re conveying, step into somebody else’s head, and hear from that other person’s perspective the tone that they probably didn’t know they were conveying… and then to do this from multiple potential readers’ perspectives. With so many potential ways of failing at this kind of writing, it’s a good thing that readers will be trying to read charitably!

Mini Rant About Gtalk’s Idle Status

By IRIS Posted on by

Part of the reason I love IM and dislike the phone is that I have a better chance of telling if the person on the other end is interruptable before I interrupt them when we’re talking via IM. Phones don’t have statuses, so I get shy.

Most the time IM statuses make sense. People are either available or away. It’s not rocket science. But Google just had to mess with a good thing and use an “Idle” status that every other chat client I’ve used interprets as “Away.” Not only that, but if you were once available but haven’t done anything for a couple of minutes, it sets you to Idle. If you were once busy but haven’t done anything for a while, it sets you to Idle. Both look exactly the same, and both look like you’re “Away” from any other chat client. This means that I now have no clue if you’re available, and that the only ways I might have a chance at guessing are if I remember that you tend to use Google Talk through the Gmail page or the Gtalk client or if you add clarifying text to your status.

Dear Google, if you’re going to do Idle statuses, you should really stick to something that means “I used to be available but I haven’t chatted in a while,” and this should not look like an Away status to every other client out there. If people were Away and have been for a long time, chances are they’re still Away, so switching to Idle doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If it makes a difference, though, you could have another status that means “I used to be away but I haven’t checked in for a while.” This way we’re return to a land of less confusion.

Shoving and Making in 2009

By IRIS Posted on by


The first annual (I hope) LSW Shovers & Makers awards are being announced as we speak, and I’ve got to say, it’s inspiring.

We all know that we do a lot of good work in this profession, and that it takes a village, and all that. This is tangible expression that these things we know must be true in theory really are true. I’ve been sitting here refreshing the site and getting inspired anew by what I’ve read there, and I hope that each of you will take the time to write up a little bit about what you’ve done lately that you’re proud of. I know a few of you and can’t wait to see you post about the work that you do, and I’d like to hear what those of you I don’t know so well have been up to.

P.S. Here is my profile on the site.

Reflecting on ACRL

By IRIS Posted on by

This time around, ACRL was a better experience than last time, thanks in a large part to those of you who introduced yourselves to me, and to several of my LSW friends who spent a great evening together on Saturday. As I sat in the closing keynote (with IRA GLASS, people!!! Now that’s how to close out a conference!), Ira’s performance reinforced what I love about this profession, what made the sessions that worked work, and what had been missing from the sessions that failed to live up to my expectations.

He sat on that stage, surrounded by drapery, potted trees, two giant screens, an ACRL logo-bedecked podium, and stage lights. He sat there in a hoodie behind a tangle of cords, a mixing board, two high-powered CD players, and a large microphone. And in the midst of all this, there in that stark contrast of the majestic and the mundane, he explained that facts and their presentation can either be surprising and joyful, or they can be confining and boring. Story telling depends on suspense and on the story-teller’s ability to couple facts with ideas. Plot isn’t enough to hold our interest. Plots become stories when the story-teller can zoom out, so to speak, and show the broader landscape that gives these factual details their context. Story is all about how facts — so local, so specific — apply to something larger, something more meaningful.

Most of the sessions I attended were chock-full of facts. Several had organized those facts into a cohesive plot. Only a couple, though, managed to make those facts interesting and broadly applicable. Only a couple managed to zoom out and perform that first level of abstraction that would lodge in their listeners’ minds, prime them for that level of anticipation and surprise that makes learning enjoyable.

Even beyond explicating my own enjoyment and my own learning at this particular conference (or lack thereof), I hope I can work a healthy respect for surprise, suspense, joy — story – into my teaching. Research is the quintessential environment for coupling facts and ideas, and it can be presented in ways that either stifle interest or expand it, ways that either bore or surprise. If my students learn nothing more than that what they find can interest people, I will consider that they have learned something important (and that they should come back to me to learn how to actually go about mimicking the research habits of scholars in their fields).

Ira may have covered this in the 20 minutes after I had to leave to catch my flight home, but I think the musical pauses he works into his show (and which he worked into his performance at ACRL) are also key elements of story telling. If his structure is plot, plot, plot, plot, idea, plot, plot, idea, then I think the pauses exist to give people space to comprehend. It’s the serious version of comic timing, and it’s just as important to the overall effect. And if there’s one thing that I learned from watching both Ira and Sherman Alexie (another incredible speaker that I truly enjoyed listening to at this conference), it is that these pauses are carefully planned. There is nothing accidental about them, just as there’s nothing accidental about the ideas that these story-tellers present to give their plots meaning.

I am very bad at pausing.

Little by little I will become a better teacher and presenter. And in a strange way, both the successful presentations at this conference and the presentations that failed to deliver served to illustrate just where I want to concentrate my efforts this coming term.