Journal Club: Leading the Library

 Sharon’s Journal Club (if you’re reading this, you’re in the club) Presents:

 

Leading the Library (When You’reNot in Charge)

By Beth Boatright

As I was adding some fresh journal articles to my “to read” pile, I decided to flick through the pile and read some of the ones I hadn’t gotten around to yet. This article is from 2015, and I don’t know if I got it at the time and forgot about it, or if I came across it more recently while researching something else, or if someone had recommended it and I’d downloaded it but then forgotten it.

Either way, it turned out to be a very interesting read – one I recommend for everyone who works in a library, no matter how “lowly” the position. If you recommended it to me – thanks! I quite enjoyed it.

Some advanced warning: I’ve been reading about Permaculture Design Principles lately and toying with applying them to non-gardening situations (everything you work on is your garden, if you think about it that way), so some of my reflections on this article talks about that. Boatright’s article itself is completely free of all permaculture references.

Boatright’s article is an interesting angle on what I’d think of as “engaging with your job for productivity and work satisfaction.” She comes from the angle of seeing yourself as having a “leadership” role, even if you have absolutely no authority in the library whatsoever.

Effective library operations requires everyone to “lead” in their position – to have a leadership team, if you will, in which each person is “taking the lead” in their role, and thereby being a “leader” within the scope of their actual job position.

I’ve read similar things before that were talking about “mindful” or “active” engagement in your work to create opportunities for advancement and job satisfaction, and I think Boatright has read many similar articles, but wants to call it “leadership” rather than “active engagement” or any of the other buzzwords that have been buzzing about.

I suspect she’s trying to speak to that “If I were in charge, things would be different” grumbling that sits in the heart of many librarians (and, oddly, continues to be there no matter how far up the food chain you find yourself – even people in management positions in libraries are not actually “in charge” – that’s usually some bureaucrat who has very little interest in or understanding of libraries).

Well, you are in charge (of your piece of the puzzle) and you can make a difference (even if it’s just a small one). The main beneficiaries might very well be you and your immediate co-workers, but it will flow on in all directions. Whatever positive differences you make in your work will flow downstream to the clients, and upstream to the other members of the library team.

To start with, you need to embrace the first Permaculture Design Principle (I warned you): Observe and Interact.

Guess what? This is exactly what we should be doing for our PDPs (PMPs?... whatever they end up being called). You “identify and thoughtfully consider the mission, vision and purpose statements of your college, library and/or department’s administrations” (345) – in other words, check out the strategic plan of the library, but also (if you can) take a look at whatever “this is what we want to achieve” visionary-type guff the division and the university have made available. Then you look at your own job description to see what’s expected of someone in your role.

Then what you do is look at how you, being in that role, can contribute to the library/division/university achieving what it needs to achieve. How can you “lead” your team from your position so that goals are set and accomplished in order to make a positive contribution?

Back to “Observe and Interact”. You start by taking a look at the bigger picture – not just the day-to-day stuff of your specific job as you’re doing it right now, but the “garden” as a whole. The environment it sits in, what is happening, where the energy is flowing or getting lost or stuck, where we’re overusing some resources or underusing other opportunities…

When you see what needs to be done for the health and success of the “garden” in interaction with the “environment” (not just what you think should happen sitting in your current job dissatisfaction and saying “If I were in charge…”) then you can interact – see what is within your ability to achieve with your efforts, and make measurable goals where you know what you want to accomplish and you can see how you will go about doing it and how you will know it has been done.

Oh, look, we’re back in the PDP again.

This also involves another Permaculture Design Principle: “Design from Patterns to Details”. And, potentially also, “Obtain a Yield” – at the end of the day, you want to have something to show for your efforts. The “yeild” you want to obtain should be part of the plan you come up with as you design the details out of your patterns.

The article goes on to talk more about goal setting and time management and stuff like that from a “leadership” perspective. I won’t recount all of it because that would be silly (and why would you read the article if my commentary on it was twice as long and covered everything it said?). But I will draw attention to the simple four-square time management technique Boatright recommends: ask yourself if this is important or not important, and if it is urgent or not urgent. Schedule time especially to work on the “important but not urgent” tasks as they’re probably where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.

Don’t let the things that are urgent but not important distract you from doing what is important but not urgent.

The other things Boatright mentioned that I want to especially draw attention to (while still leaving it worth your while reading the article itself) are communication and responsibility/accountability.

A good leader communicates with their team. They tell them what challenges are being faced and what progress is being made. This is something I personally need to work on, because reports are one of those “important but not urgent” things that usually get shunted to one side by the myriad of “urgent” things that seem more important to me at the time. But reports and other forms of communication where you let the rest of the team know what is going on… these are good and useful things. We should be using them to good effect.

The idea of accountability dovetails with learning from the outcomes of what you’ve been doing. We talk about learning from our mistakes, and that is part of this. So is learning from our successes, and learning from everything else (this coincides with the Permaculture Design Principle, “Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback). Good, bad or indifferent, we need to look at what has happened as a direct results of our actions and recognise them as our responsibility. The buck stops with us, and rather than hope nobody notices it so we don’t have to “fess up”, we should immediately start thinking about “how can I/we improve this situation?”

The last thing I want to touch on is the idea of “build[ing] your team” (351), even if you don’t have anyone under you. Whether you are the absolute bottom of the food chain or a team leader with a group of people who answer to you, you still work with others (you might not see them, but you work with them). You still have the power to make their jobs a joy or a misery. A leader focuses on “effectively building relationships, motivating others, communicating, and collaborating” (351).

It’s really quite simply achieved. You know what kind of support you would need from others to do your job well – look at the jobs of your team members (from the colleagues sitting “next” to you right up to the Director) and ask yourself what support they need from you to do their jobs well.

I’m going to be chewing on this article a bit as I figure out what kind of librarian I want to be this year (I just hope to God that Boatright’s “encouragement” that I might be given more responsibility as a result is wrong).

Meanwhile, here are my “quotable quotes” from the article:

“Whether or not you have organizational authority, you can still make things better for other people, and in doing so, you will make things better for yourself as well” (351).

“One challenge and opportunity of leadership without authority is to rally behind the ideas and strategies of our administrators and find ways to make things work for everyone involved” (352).

“The more engaged you are, the better your library’s outcomes will be” (355).

Boatright, Beth. "Leading the Library (When You're Not in Charge)." College & Undergraduate Libraries, vol. 22, 2015, pp. 343-57, Taylor & Francis Online, doi:10.1080/10691316.2015.1070702.

Structure of a Paper

I found this in my notes from when I was doing the Graduate Diploma of Education (Tertiary Teaching).  It's the basic structure of a paper (for a journal).  I thought it was worth keeping - but it's also worth sharing.

These sorts of visual structures are gold, when you have never written something before, and you are trying to work out what it should look like:

Structure of a Paper

1. Set the scene
2. Present the Question/Problem your paper will address
3. Literature Review
4. Method
1. participants
2. data collection
3. data analysis
5. Present the Findings
6. Discussion (tying the findings to the literature review)
7. Conclusion.

Oh, and here's some heads-up about  one of the core differences between writing an essay for a journal and writing one for an assignment:

In a journal article, it is perfectly acceptable to talk about the fact that you are writing a paper.  You can use things like "we did X and we thought it would generate Y but it produced Z instead" and "this paper will explore the effect A has on B in the context of C".  However, you should try to stay as objective and neutral as you can - try to keep things general and professional, and avoid personal comments as much as possible.  The more scientific your article, the less "okay" it is to use personal pronouns (you still avoid contractions and colloquialisms, regardless of what you are writing).

In an academic essay, you avoid mentioning yourself (don't use personal pronouns) or drawing attention to the fact that you are writing an essay (although some lecturers will want the "this essay will" statement in the introduction, many consider it poor writing - find out what the person marking your essay expects).

Economics of Language Choice and Conlangs

Back in 1998 Abram de Swaan wrote a fascinating two-piece article for the journal Language Problems and Language Planning called  "A Political Sociology of the World Language System (1): The Dynamics of Language Spread" and "A Political Sociology of the World Language System (2): The Unequal Exchange of Texts".

The central argument of these articles is that people choose what second language to learn based on similar "economic" considerations that they would use to choose what telecommunications network to join (or, in modern terms, what operating system to throw themselves into).

He talked about languages having a Q-value, which is the desirability of the language based on the number of native speakers and the number of people who already speak it as a second language.  When choosing a second language to learn, most people go for one that will give them the most communicative bang for their buck, in other words.

If you lived in an area where most people spoke their own indigenous language or Dutch, you would see Dutch as being an attractive option, because it would give you a greater number of other people to communicate with.  Dutch is the center of a language constellation in that region, and has a high Q-value.  However, Dutch is but a planet circling the sun in the larger constellation where the big shiny language is German.  You might decide that German is therefore more attractive.

The biggest and shiniest language of them all is, of course, English - if for no other reason than the sheer numbers of people who speak it as a second language.  However, your personal needs in your local area might lead you to choose the big, shiny language in your smaller constellation, simply because you think you, personally, will speak to more people and have a greater supply of texts in that way.

Basically, de Swaan argues that people want consumer confidence in whatever language they choose to learn in addition to their own.

The thing that struck me about his argument, although it seemed to slip de Swaan's attention completely, is how this applies to constructed or planned languages.  He did give them a passing glance, but only to point out that artificial languages to exist, not to note that the consumer argument that he had observed for natural languages applied even more-so to those that have been constructed.

How many constructed/auxiliary languages have come and gone over the years?  The big winners in the game are the ones that look like they have legs - if you know what I mean.  Klingon has an army of geeks making sure it survives, and Esperanto has numbers.  The numbers make it more attractive to anyone who might be thinking of taking up an auxiliary language instead of, say, French or Spanish.

There was, at some point, a bit of a Betamax vs VHS thing happening between Volapük and Esperanto.  Esperanto won that consumer battle.  Now people learning an auxiliary language can choose between Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua if they want an IAL spoken by more than four people - and even then, Esperanto has the numbers.

I know one of the reasons why I'm learning Esperanto* is consumer confidence.  There are, depending on your sources, somewhere between 50,000 and 2 million speakers, and the language has been around for 125 years.  I have previously suggested that it was only mildly more useful, as a second language, than Welsh - but I've changed my mind on that point.  I have some faith that learning Esperanto is not going to be a complete waste of time.  I can't say I would feel the same about the other conlangs and IALs.

The consumer confidence element of language choice applies so very clearly to constructed and auxiliary languages it's staggering.  I'll have to see if someone has written a paper about it - I'd be very surprised if they haven't, but I have a strange feeling such a paper would probably be written in either Esperanto or Interlingua...



*I am learning Esperanto, but I'm doing it very slowly.  Don't expect posts in Esperanto any time soon.

LPLP

I've recently discovered the journal Language Problems & Language Planning - and, by "recently", I mean I noticed it sitting on our shelves ages ago but I have finally taken the time to see what kind of articles are inside it.

It's a highly interesting journal that is dedicated to the decisions people make about languages.

The stuff that comes out of our mouths on a day to day basis is reasonably free of official decisions (some would argue it is reasonably free of decisions, full stop), but there are a lot of official decisions to be made about the language we use in governments, schools and courts - not to mention the languages that need official support to survive.

China is trying to build an "improved" standard writing system.  The Dutch spelling system is apparently doomed to eternal conflict.  Cornish is trying to come back from the dead.  French Canadians are trying to make sure they can continue to have their own schools.  Minority languages all over the world are trying to gain recognition and support.  Esperanto is just plain interesting - and still kind of almost trying to change the world (but only subtly - much like Fabian Socialism*).

Multilingualism, bilingual education, multiculturalism and heritage languages that won't just lay down and die...

I have a habit of thinking about languages in terms of grammar and vocabulary (and sometimes philology and literature) - but the history and politics of languages can be incredibly fascinating, and that's what LPLP takes as its focus.

Some of the issues I've mentioned above might be a little less than topical.  For some reason I've started reading through the journal beginning with Volume 20 - from 1996.  I went to that volume to find an article referenced in a more current issue... and ended up staying for a while.

I'm finding the language climate of the late 1990s quite fascinating at the moment.  I've just finished reading a 1997 article on the kerfuffle over the 1994 attempted spelling reforms for Dutch.  Dirk Jacobs points out that the biggest problem with fixing spelling is the fact that professional writers (journalists, authors, etc) have a large stake in the issue and more clout in the public sphere than linguists can muster.  He concludes that spelling reform will only be able to happen if you get the journalists on-side first (and doubts that will be an easy thing to do).

I've had a few ideas challenged since I starting reading this journal.  One of the more recent articles, by Sabine Fiedler, drew my attention to the unquestioning respect we have for native speakers, and raised the point that a native speaker isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all of a language.  That was an eye-opener.

It's a fascinating journal - and taking me on a fascinating journey.  I wonder if I'll keep travelling through the 1990s and 2000s.  I wonder what I'll learn along the way...




*-What do we want?
-Gradual change!
-When do we want it?
-In due course!

Slightly Foxed

I have previously mentioned my habit of subscribing to journals and magazines for a year to see if they are interesting enough to sustain my attention, and the fact that most of the time I end up wondering why I bothered.

There are various things that turn up in my mail box (my actual mail box) which produce a reaction much like this:

"Oh!  I have mail!  Oh.  It's only that."

Slightly Foxed is different. The fourth issue of my subscription turned up in my mail box a couple of weeks ago, and I felt happy for the rest of the day.

Have you ever had something arrive in the mail that actually made you clap your hands and say "Oh, good!"? Well that's what Slightly Foxed does for me.

I discovered this wonderful magazine by dint of a piece of paper that fell out of a copy of Literature Review, which I bought when I was trying to find Good Reading in a news agency that didn't have it.

I often find reading about books is much more achievable than reading the books themselves. Good Reading is a nice bit of fluff that's great for finding out what books are out there. Literature Review is like the book reviews you find in the "boffin" section of the Weekend papers - can be good, but can be a bit like hard work.

Slightly Foxed is just a nice read. It's a collection of essays about reading. The contributors talk about a book or an author or a movement that touched them in some way. Any given topic about books seems to be fair game. How Wind in the Willows shaped someone's childhood; What it was like running a subscription library out of a department store; what one particular series of out-of-print mountaineering books has to offer a reader lucky enough to find them...

The contributors are novelists, magazine editors, reporters, librarians... People from all over the place, and they are all writing about something they find quite interesting. This makes for a wonderfully eclectic collection of articles.  While I must admit that I don't read all of the articles immediately, I find I've usually read the entire issue by the time the next one arrives in my mail box.

The journal is run out of a bookshop in London - one that has taken to reprinting out of print books as well as their own quarterly collection of essays.  I expect I'll probably have to visit that shop if I ever go to London...

Oh, and the magazine is just lovely, physically. They use a buff coloured paper stock that feels wonderfully smooth to touch - and my first issue came tied up in a ribbon (seriously). You feel like these people really love books - not only the content, but also the form.

Slightly Foxed has become one of the few journals I have subscribed to for a second year - and, in a real first, I've actually bought a book as a result of reading one of the reviews.  A real book.  Brand new.  In hardcover.  It cost money.  This is not something I usually do.

I would happily recommend this publication to anyone who likes reading - especially if they like discovering works they've never heard of before.  It's a bit like sitting down with a group of bookish friends and asking the question "have you read any good books recently?"

From the New Journals Shelf:

Canadian Music Educator/Musicien éducateur au Canada vol. 50 no.2

In the Winter 2008 copy of Canadian Music Educator I came across a very interesting article concerning gender stereotypes and musical instrument selection.

Sommer Buttu, a music teacher in Toronto who has taught in American schools in Kuwait and Israel, was intrigued by the gender stereotypes that still seem to plague instrument selection in school music programmes, so she conducted a small study on whether or not these stereotypes effect students in all-girls' schools the same way they seem to effect students in co-education schools:

"Perceptions of Female Students in a Same-sex School: Gender Stereotypes and Musical Instruments".

I have to admit I hadn't actually considered gender stereotyping in the band before. Somehow, I naïvely thought people just picked up instruments they were interested in playing, and then they either took to them or they didn't. Sommer Butto seemed to feel the same way when she started teaching music, then the parents of her students showed her the error of her ways.

She describes a scene in which the mother of one of her female students (in a co-ed school) took issue with the girl having the horn assigned to her because "it is not a girl's instrument and is not an instrument girls should play". I personally found this something of a revelation, because I've always seen women in the horn section of a band or orchestra. If I was going to give generalised gender attributes to instruments, I would assume a horn was a fairly "girly" instrument, and not unbecoming of a lady at all. Certainly not like those nasty, masculine flugabones.

Sommer describes the frustration of trying to match instruments with children who just want to play, when society (particularly through their parents) tries to give gender values to things which should, in all honesty, be gender neutral.

She then goes on to talk about her experiences teaching in an all-girls' school. The fact that every single instrument in the orchestra would have to be played by a girl, and the supportive environment fostered by the same-sex groups, created a completely different approach to instrument selection. There was a more open approach to the instruments, and the girls' parents had no problems with their selections.

In the study she conducted, Sommer found that girls in same-sex schools felt perfectly free to take up low brass and percussion instruments, and only noticed issues with gender when attending co-educational band camps and competitions.

Tellingly, she also found they felt sorry for boys. Why? Because a girl can take up an instrument that isn't considered "girly" and be considered a pioneer worthy of respect. Should a boy try to take up an instrument that wasn't considered to be "manly", though, he wouldn't be given the same kudos. Particularly male flautists. Apparently the flute is an exceptionally "girly" instrument.

Sommer gives some recommendations to pedagogical practice (which basically consist of "let the children play, but give them a lot of support") and suggests another study on boys in a same-sex schooling environment should be undertaken.

Some interesting quotes from the article:

"Research indicates that parents, peers and society all play a major role in dictating the constructed ideas of gender roles and expectations in the area of musical instruments" (p. 31)

"From a very young age, the girls see ensembles that are comprised of all females; thus the sight of a small grade seven girl transporting a tuba is neither a surprise nor an anomaly, rather a reality that is encouraged and celebrated" (p. 31)

"Many participants in this study who have broken gender stereotypes commented that prior to playing their instrument, they were unaware that women could play low brass or percussion instruments" (p. 32)

"In furthering the scope and depth of gender research in music education, it is my hope that our profession can come closer to lessening the damaging stereotypes to the point that they will no longer be a factor in the lives of our young instrumentalists" (p. 33)


Butto, S. (2008). Perceptions of Female Students in a Same-sex School: Gender Stereotypes and Musical Instruments. Canadian Music Educator. 50 (2), 30-33.