As you may or may not know, I’m in the midst of a job search for the perfect entry-level librarian job. I’m fairly flexible, since I’m interested in so many different aspects of the field, have experience in many, and I am not entirely set on a specific location (though certainly, I have preferences). I’m young so I know this is really my opportunity to go somewhere totally new and experience it.
And as we all know, the market for all jobs is weak, and librarianship is no different. I can’t count the number of hours I’ve spent searching and applying, and while I’m positive about things eventually falling into place, one thing that really frustrates me is how one can search for positions.
There are some wonderful library-related job resources out there — ALA’s JobList, LISJobs.com, LibraryJoblines, the iSchool Jobweb, and so forth. Almost every state association has some sort of job bank, as well. And then there are the libraries that post their openings only on their website or the city in which the library is located posts it on their website.
All of that’s to say is that it’s a little bit of everywhere.
Even when you’re able to pull together a nice list of regular stops in your daily hunting rotation, sometimes it’s not easy to search through them. I’m a bit of an odd searcher, maybe, in that there are days I am interested only in certain types of jobs or jobs in a certain area of the country or jobs in a specific state. While I know how to run a good database query, sometimes it’s not sufficient for my needs [boy, I'm a needy one when it comes to how I want my information!].
So to resolve this, I’ve decided to develop a huge “database” of library job sites through delicious. In doing so, I’ve taken the effort to tag the links with as much useful information as possible, as well as leave some type of description for each link. Some descriptions aren’t particularly insightful, but others are useful as to locating the actual employment information that can sometimes be buried within another page.
As I type this, I’ve reached 300 unique links, among which are links to specific library websites, city websites, giant general databases, smaller state-based search engines, and others. Likewise, the primary links right now are to public libraries. That is to say, it’s clearly not comprehensive yet. But it’s a start. I hope to continue building this and hope to recruit a few other people with the passion I have for pooling resources like this together.
Clearly, I know there are websites out there — and I point specifically to my alma mater’s jobweb — that offer many different links to jobs. I’ve found, though, there are a number that are a little out of date, dead links, not comprehensive (for example — in a list of links to jobs in the 50 states Nevada is missing), or generally not searchable in the way that I like to approach my job search.
I’m influenced here by Dave Weinberger and many of the ideas he hashes out in Everything is Miscellaneous as well as Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. I’m a believer in the use of tagging. Since the job search is primarily — if not entirely — web based now, why can’t we give as many entrances into this information as possible? Why be limited?
Since librarianship is a field of collaboration, I made this account open to everyone and I am trying to spread the word. I’ve squatted a Twitter account, but I don’t know if it’ll be as useful as I like for spreading the word. Rather, I suspect it might be able to talk for itself, particularly if I can get a couple of people on board to help out.
So, click HERE to locate my library job links project. Tell me what you think and let me know if you want to help out. More importantly, SHARE it. While it certainly begins as a way for me to wrap my head around the vast potential opportunities, I think that it’s only right to make this process as efficient to myself and others as possible.
And if you’re interested, I’m hoping to get a similar project kickstarted for library blogs. While certainly there are great resources out there with links to library-related or library-created blogs, I want something more searchable, dynamic, and more inclusive (down to people’s personal blogs of their own experiences). Collaboration and resource sharing - it’s what I’m all about.
Let me know if you’re on to help. Or if you find this useful.
Ever had those moments when you think about your collective experience and education and you see how it all fits together so perfectly? I had a moment like that when I was in my final semester of school. That moment made me understand how important and vital a role that the public library can and should play in a community. Don’t get me wrong, as I’d obviously had that thought before or else I’d never have entered the field, but it was a culmination of all my reading and projects that made me really want to advocate the idea that libraries are a third place in the American culture and landscape.
As our social scripts and ideas are challenged and transformed thanks to the economy or to the fact we no longer have the one-income one-mortgage standard by which to judge our life’s success, we really do need to find that third place. That third place becomes the opportunity to learn, grow, and understand one another, while simultaneously serving as a place to let loose and be our public selves.
Let’s step back from the larger idea for a second and build up to it.
In undergrad, I took a course in public history and memory. While we did our fair share of listening to and participating in lectures and reading, the crux of the course was the creation of a digital exhibit. We broke into teams and chose from a number of cultural institutions in eastern Iowa where we had the opportunity to explore a collection and build our story. I had the opportunity to work with a partner at the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) in Iowa City. We were told early on that the SHSI had an interesting collection of historical home photos. Since eastern Iowa is home to so many beautiful original Victorian homes, this was an exciting prospect. When we met with the curator at the SHSI, we were further told that the photos seemed to be showcasing the porches of these homes.
That’s when the idea clicked.
My partner and I explored the idea of how, as a culture in America, we’ve moved from having grand, welcoming porches to a society of back porches. There’s been a shift from the porch as a welcome mat to neighbors and the community to the back patio, hidden away behind fences. Of course, this coincides with other societal changes, including the automobile invasion and suburbia. The link a couple lines up takes you to the project and showcases our digital exhibit — how we’ve shifted, what it means, and what impact it has on our American culture.
Fast forward a year and a half later, and I have the opportunity to pick out a book to read and give a report on in my Knowledge Management course. Although there were many interesting choices from which to choose, I went with Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place. Sparing the slideshow, the book focuses on how we have no third place in America. We have a problem of acreage, schedules and privacy that thrive as we have only two real “places” we see daily: work and home. When we seek relaxation, we tend to find ourselves indulging in places of consumption — restaurants, shopping, malls, and so forth — where we find our stress decreases because these are informal places outside the settings of home and work.
However, the problem is that in order to be truly happy and fulfilled, we should have a tripod of life experiences: the domestic, the productive, and the social. We get the first at home, the second at work, and the third — well, as much as we tell ourselves that shopping is a social activity because we may indulge in it with friends, it’s not social — is absent.
The third place, Oldenburg argues, is a neutral space that is a leveller bringing together people from all walks of life. The goals of the third place are accessibility, accommodation, and conversation. They’re places of low profile that invite playfulness and become a home away from home. The third place brings a level of novelty into our daily lives because of the loose structure and fluidity which are catalysts for collective creativity. Likewise, the third place brings perspective, as it allows for a reality check for all — where else can the plumber and the high-power attorney interact on an equal ground about topics without the status of their profession intermingling in the process? Oldenburg adds, too, that the third place is a spiritual tonic allowing people joy, vivacity and relief, as well as friends by the set: people with whom we can interact in a different way than we do our co-workers or with those we know intimately enough to invite into our homes (the sacred and private space).
Where else can we discuss hyperlocal issues openly without a pre-schedule forum, associate with community members, and have “fun with the lid kept on?” The third space is an outpost into the public domain. It quells loneliness simply by being a space where people interact without needing to make a purchase or make a million dollar proposal.
The third place, Oldenburg says, would also help us redefine our idea of streets and public places. Americans tend to associate dirty things with the words public and street when the truth is, those should be where we derive our pleasure and our fulfillment.
Besides some of the issues I had with Oldenburg’s overromanticism of Europe and blatant misogynist comments, the book is definitely worth the read. Anyone who has wondered about why we do things the way we do them would appreciate a fresh and, I think, optimistic vision of what America could become with the right collective mindset. And I think, too, we’re making these strides: we’ve got a third space in digital outlets, in the physical reemergence of pedestrian malls inside of major cities (look at places like Denver), and, where I really think we have untapped potential, the public library.
In the same class, I chose to explore the idea of a knowledge ecology and how it relates to the public library. Though it sounds complicated or unimaginable, it’s quite literally something we have set up already — the knowledge ecology suggests that rather than libraries being where people come to get information [which would only be one level of interaction], the library is where anyone and everyone can come, engage in information transfer, participate in programming, offer their own ideas and insights into library-driven events, and so forth. Rather than the library being “close stacked,” with the librarians at the helms of giving, the public library becomes entirely “open stacked,” with the librarian simply serving the role of trained facilitator. They get the conversation started, keep it going, throw out new ideas, and constantly seek feedback and ideas from the community. The community does quite the same as the librarian - it offers ideas, needs, wants, questions, and resources. Without engaging entirely with the community, the library serves more of the library’s needs rather than the community’s needs. Public libraries should strive to provide and facilitate services uniquely tailored to the people and place in which it’s at, regardless of what may be hot and happenin’ in the literature.
And by doing that, the library becomes a third place.
The more we reach out, the more we talk with the community (rather than TO the community), and the more we engage wholly in the place we are, the more we are able to become the quintessential third place. Look at the small colleges, as well as the major universities, that are moving to user-centered information commons — they’re becoming the third space. And public libraries can do it, too. Except besides focusing on the college student, it focuses on the entire community.
The bones are here. The ideas are here. The people with drive are here. Now it’s just a matter of getting that out there. I think in a recession particularly, the opportunity to remind people about how valuable the library is beyond just its features of free computers and internet can and will make a lasting impression. We want to be places people want to come, engage, and participate. I think there are opportunities to crowdsource projects in the library, and I think people would jump. Librarians should not feel confined behind the desk or the computer. They aren’t merely information centers. They connect.
Librarians should be in the community, seeing what their patrons are doing and seeking, and the library should emulate or expand upon those things. We need to be community servants beyond just the 8 hours at our place of employment. Getting our faces out there can only remind people that there are advocates for them, inviting them into a safe, fun, level, and evocative space . . . and for free [or darn near it].
Let’s get ourselves back into the middle of the community. Let’s become the third place. Now’s the time to become the community front porch. And we’re making strides toward it.
There’s much more that can be said to this effect, but, suffice to say, I think it’s vital we become not just the front porch but that we engage the community in the library’s ecosystem. In an ecosystem, nothing is central. Instead, an ecosystem cultivates and breathes through shared interactions and reactions. If we set it up as the front porch of a community, we become part of the breath of the community and we become that third space people desperately need to have in order to have a fulfilled, joyful, and amicable life.
If you’re so interested in reading my knowledge ecology paper, feel free to check it out here (.pdf download). It’s short, but by parsing out ideas from the special library/corporate world, public libraries have great opportunities to continue growing uniquely public experiences.
I’m a big fan of personal projects. We all have them — we say we’re going to to develop a web site dedicated to our favorite star or that we’re going to finally get around to making that digital scrapbook. Right now, I’m working on one myself that I’ll blog about soon; I want to make sure to give it a little more meat before showing it off.
That’s all to say that I wanted to talk about an awesome project a friend of mine from undergrad has been working on. Brian was [and, even as an alumni a few years out, still is] the web editor for our college’s newspaper, The Cornellian. So, needless to say, he’s a web savvy person. And he’s also a born and bred Iowan with incredible respect and fondness for the state.
So, over the last few years, Brian developed his own website to document some of the smaller, lesser known and off-the-beaten-path places in the great state of Iowa. Iowa Backroads is a project of showcasing a state that is too often merely considered flyover land for most people, even though there are places that get huge acclaim in major outlets (…and it’s worth mentioning that the Lincoln Cafe is indeed located in the same down as our alma mater, Cornell). Some of the cool places featured on Brian’s blog so far have included Mt. Vernon’s awesome Bijou Theatre, the world’s larged bull in Audubon, and the Amish Stringtown grocery store.
What strikes me as cool about the project is that it’s a living record. Many of these locations Brian documents are historical to their towns or are attractions to a particular town. In an era where rural states like Iowa are losing population at alarming rates and seeking to learn what and how they can maintain their young people, it’s refreshing to see these places can maintain themselves and these small towns can emerge as centers for local business and commerce. And these places don’t have to keep their businesses to the locals — Brian’s giving them exposure for people who may otherwise not understand that there is a lot of charm and life in the small state. He is, if you will, helping spread the word about the gems all over the state. I think beyond that, he’s helping promote the culture of appreciating local business. It’s a small part, much in the same way that spots for local culture in films like What Would Jesus Buy spread the word that rural life is not dead life, but instead, it is full of people and places with character and history hoping to keep their waning populations afloat. In fact, there was a wonderful post today courtesy of the Daily Yonder about a local Mexican restaurant in Denison, Iowa that made a great point about there still being a great multicultural population in small town Iowa.
Brian’s begun to work on another project at the same time he works on Iowa Backroads. He’s taking photographs of the county courthouses in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, as well as taking photographs of local post offices. And he doesn’t just limit it to Iowa, either. Brian has albums and entries in his Flickr and on his blog featuring sites in Illinois, South Dakota, and Minnesota, among others.
While he’s not quite sure where he’s going to go with these projects yet, they remind me a lot of what Stephen Bloom and Peter Feldstein did in their book The Oxford Project. I think that what is starting out as a one man project has the potential to get much more exposure — from a historical and digital collections standpoint, it seems to me there are a lot of opportunities to develop a historical portal.
There are two things that really stand out to me about Brian’s projects. The first is that it’s a nice comfort to remember a place that made me so happy and with which I have so many good memories. It gives me the opportunity to travel back to Iowa without ever leaving my seat or booking a ticket. Brian’s also done some minor marketing, sending postcards to some of his fans and to the places which he has spotlighted, letting us know about the site.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, it shows an initiative to not only think up a project but actually follow through on it. How many times have we all thought about how great it would be if we did _____ or we should do _____. It’s quite exciting to see someone do this on their own accord and know that they’re not only doing a cool project for himself and his friends, but also for the [digital] historical record.
I hope as more people dive into the digital world that more projects like this pop up. While state and local tourism boards can pour money into projects, I find that the personal approach to documenting what is cool about where they live or what they love is more real and authentic. I’m more inspired to print out a page from someone’s blog than I am to hop onto the state or local tourism website.
It’s also inspiring me to get on with getting on about my own [and much, much smaller] project. But while I continue to procrastinate on that, I’ll spend a few more hours in my virtual road trip. If nothing else, I’m building a repository of great places to set future stories or in which stories I read may themselves be set.
