librarypunk - 064 - Negotiations and Collection Strategy

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

We're talking with Scarlet Galvan, the new VPO for Negotiations at SPARC about how library contract negotiations work and can work better in the future!   https://twitter.com/panoptigoth  Media mentioned UNT Manifesto: Expectations for Library Vendors. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5308322/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko-di_Koko-da

this course. So it's part of the Masters of Music and Music Education, which is like an accelerated master's. It's like only 10 months. And the courses, they have like a full day of courses all day long and they're only like three weeks long or something or like a month long or something. And so they're not doing like research research. It's like here, I want you to go look at this article and find it or something. So I'm not necessarily having to teach them how to like, you know, build search strings and queries and stuff. But. And then, In a week, I'm going to be doing like citation. Do you have lib guides there?

No, no. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the benefit of when you're doing a one-off of lib guides is you just have like. Here's a guide. A course guide and you just hand it off to them. Well, what I, so we have, we're a Microsoft ecosystem and we do have like SharePoint. And like there is like a library sharepoint. But the courses are using something called like Bright Talk or Bright Space.

I think it's an add-on for Blueprint. afford. Yeah, which I don't have access to, but like I would love to make guides for that. So the professor is emailing like the director of the program and getting set up because I want to write out guides and stuff like in general. I was just listening. It sounds like quite a day and a super intense program. Yeah, it's for people who want to like be music teachers. And so they're learning like the history music education while also like learning basics of instruments that they aren't trained in just to be music teachers. And so all of this getting a master's degree in 10 months. There's an online version too that people can take longer because like if they have like a job already and stuff.

I imagine most people doing it. Do you have to have a master's to teach there like high school or K-12? Because some states do, but Florida didn't. I would have to check with Massachusetts, But this program does, you get accreditation as part of it as well, like for teaching. Yeah, it's super easy in Florida to get certified as a teacher. Yeah, I took the general knowledge test. It was the easiest test to ever taken. Yeah, I'd have to look up. It's interesting because most people are coming from either like conservatory backgrounds

or straight up just like, you know, even outside of that. But music backgrounds were, they're in a master's program, but like they haven't learned how to do citations or anything, really. So it's an interesting environment. I was wondering how you train to be a music teacher because you have to teach like, I mean, mostly teach a lot of percussion, but you have to teach like recorders and singing. Or unlike woodwinds and like strings and all sorts of stuff. If you're the band director, yeah. Yeah, that's what, yeah, like music teachers.

I have not done a podcast before. So it's easy. Yeah. You just talk. Sure. I'm Justin. I'm a school. Galcom Library, my pronouns are he and him. I'm Jay. I'm a music librarian, and my pronouns are he, him.

And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Scarlett Galvin. I'm the Collection Strategist Librarian at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, and I generally use she, her, hers. Welcome. Did you lose the mute button again? No, I didn't. It's good to be here. So, I don't have a segment. Anyone see any tweets that got them annoyed? I've been off Twitter. I've just been watching a lot of anime because I'm depressed. Not related to libraries. No, I'm, yeah. There was some discourse the past couple days, but I can't, yeah.

I can't think of library things, though. I feel like there's less library Twitter drama recently. Yeah, also I've been passing out at like 8 p.m. because I've been walking 12 miles a day. That's also. A new job, right? So that's, yeah. I always have to sleep a lot whenever I have switched jobs.

Yeah, so yeah, I don't know. I mean, I see like school library stuff pop up here and there with like the book bannings and like. Yeah, like fall. Cot moms like went to look at curriculum and like docs library workers and stuff. But they've made it to the UK now, which is not surprising, but the whole turf brigade has. I surprised it took them this long. Yeah. gotten mad at drag queen's story hours in the UK now.

I mean, the rate at which they're picking up our bad habits is accelerating. You know, I know we have cultural hegemony in the U.S., but, you know, come on, guys. Get your own thing. Up yours, woke moralists. We'll see who cancels who. I don't know if I'm ever going to get rid of that one. Jordan Peters is my favorite. I don't think you ever can.

Oh, that's so good. I love, I was in like a little, let's do like a meeting. up and ask each other questions and we'll give each other book recommendations based off of it. And one of the ones that someone got asked was like, oh, what's a book that like he like couldn't finish? And the person said 12 rules for life. And I like in the chat went like, that's because Jordan Peterson sucks. And someone else laughed. And then someone went like, hey now. And then started talking about how good Jordan Peterson was and his like maps of meeting or whatever, like his first book that's like a hot mess of whatever and I'm like sitting here like uh oh he really had a

he really had a chance to become the the guy who keeps cranking out those books every once in a while they're like weird neoliberal idea oh god completely blanking on his name but people were real popular like seven or eight years ago and he would just release a book every once in a while that was like violence is historical lows everything is getting better it was just pure ideology Oh, is it? There are so many people. It's distressing to me. I was trying to think of who that might be and realized exactly how many, how many white guy authors that that might apply to. And it lagged my brain a little bit. So, hang on. I got it. Stephen Pinker. That's who it is. Ah, not on my list, but you know what? If he had given me a minute, I would have gotten through Michael Gladwell or Malcolm Gladwell. And maybe Stephen Pinker. That's right. He kind of, he's kind of, you know, waiting for the singularity so he can reunite with his dad. I need to remember if that's him or somebody else. I think that's Stephen Pinker.

Yeah, there was a span of time in the 2010s where he just came out with a book every couple years and everyone just went like a bunch of people liked it and then a bunch of people went, this is shit. Like, this is a bad argument. I was about to say, Scrolet, like, isn't that the plot of contact? I think, kind of. Well, no, wait. This might be different or I might have gotten this wrong or both people might have published

something along sort of the similar line. But it's either Stephen Pinger or Ray Kurzweil, who is 100%. The singularity is going to happen. And I just sort of look at what Amazon will recommend me and think, no, we are nowhere near what you're talking about and won't be for some time, if only because the people who would stand to gain the most from having that level of technology aren't using it. No, I don't need another non-perishable thing that should last me 10 years. But thanks.

Now I want to rewatch contact. You'll see in contact. Which one is contact? Is that the one with the writing system? No, that's not. Jody Foster in space. Jody Foster windsurfing with her dead dad on a beach because of aliens and Matthew McConaughey's in it. And it's written by Carl Sagan and it's a beautiful meditation on faith and science and how they're not so different.

And it slaps. It's great. Stephen Pinker writes some stuff about AI, but I don't, you just, I think he's more of like a human level AI. A.I. A general AI is coming in like 10 years and it's going to be bad for. for us. Aren't the AI bros, like, really into, like, some, like, doom or death cult shit right now? I mean, there's always been that strain. You've had, like, the Rokos Baselist kind of people who just can't do philosophy

because they refuse to read a book that's not, like, shit science fiction. Yeah, like the, oh, God, what is the, um, that one online website forum thing? I don't know, but apparently they've got some, like, AI death cult, Doom or forums going around AI Recalibration or something like that, but it's like it's getting kind of death cold apparently. I'm like adjacent to that on Twitter

for some reason. But I don't know anything about AI. I know how to make me tweets and pictures of Muppets doing different stuff. I like the ones where it makes like Marx do things. Dolly is really getting some heat.

like recently. Yeah, like we should do an episode on Dolly and like copyright because I see people, obviously I agree with some of the takes, but also the people that say it's copyright infringement. I think they're wrong, but I might be wrong. It's just not written into copyright law, but like because the law only applies to persons. So like you would have to make an AI a person. And also the work being generated, it's transformative.

It's like remix culture. They're not trying to distribute the original works. Right. That's kind of the crux of the issue. Yeah. But it's also like, I guess the idea is just like unfettered access to things of making copies for research purposes. It's like, I guess people don't find that very compelling, even though it's like one of the most important. I find that compelling.

Unless you're in academia, it's not an exception you think about much, like copyright exceptions for research purposes. Most of the time it's like critique or stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, and I think like the questions of like legality is its own thing, but like questions of like legality and stuff are different than just how people feel about it. Like people can still be like this is gross and wrong and it might be, but it's still not technically violating copyright law or it can't because it's AI. I was thinking about it today with electronic music and like, because I've been listening to like really shitty anime music in the intros. and I keep wondering like, okay, these drums are probably fake.

I wonder if the guitars are fake, if they're all on the computer, if they're all beep boop. And then, like, one day AI will just generate music and the only good music will be intentionally shitty music because you know human made it.

My dad uses the software called Band in the Box a lot because, like, he plays guitar and he sings, but that's it. And he often will, like, write, like, demos for studios that, then they'll have other artists, like, where the, like, where the studio has its own library of, like, oh, here are songs you can pick from. And then, like, you know, artists who can come in and be like, oh, yeah, I like this one and,

like, record it, you whatever. And my dad will use band in the box for all the instruments that he can't play. I mean, obviously, like, drums is kind of hard. And he's not using violins or anything because no one's gotten midi vibrato, right? But otherwise, like, you can't really tell. and he's just using like, because it's country music. So it's like very basic standard like licks and stuff. Yeah, it's weird.

He's been doing it for years. Like it's been that good for a while. I feel like country is probably one of the ones that's easier to sell for. Yeah. I think you have a lot of people who just buy it more. That's kind of, that's one of the characters in questionable content. That's like his whole job is he writes shitty country songs and sells them and he

like hates doing it, but it makes them a ton of money. No, my, my dad's a good. songwriter he likes it. So he just like does it in his bedroom. So Scarlett, I wanted you to come on because you have recently taken up a new position at Spark. Do you want to tell me about it? Because I haven't been keeping up with the call for like the application process and everything. So I kind of have missed what the job is for.

Sure. So Spark put out a call for visiting program officers in a couple of different arenas. One is for privacy. There's another for open models and one for negotiation. The role continues on what Katlyn Carter built. She's over at Helios now as their project manager, project coordinator. I can't remember. And one of the things that I've been trying to do professionally in terms of finding a place,

because it's taken me a while to do that a little bit, has been to go toward people who seem to like what I do and seem to be doing things that are similar have aligned goals. And so I asked about the VPO roles because I noticed I'm on the steering committee for Spark as well and noticed that they hadn't made any kind of announcement about hiring for that. And so I reached out and talked with them about the search and it seemed to be a good fit. So as far as, you know, any sort of interview process, it was one of the better ones I've had, if only because it was an actual frank discussion about what people we're looking for in the role and the job and what different candidates wanted to do.

So in that sense, it was pretty positive. What the VPO role for negotiations is going to do is continue the work with the community of practice that's already been built that has a bunch of subgroups that have to do with things like data analysis and reinvestment after we cancel things and trying to get closer toward open. And I think one of the goals with that program is kind of marshalling a lot of the energy and maybe bravery or courage, although I really hate using those words to describe that work that we need to have in order to have a better, I guess, or different, even relationship with third-party vendors. It's, since it's closely related to the work I'm doing for the day job, I guess, which makes it sound like I'm a superhero later where I just

sort of put on the OA costume and go yell at Elsevier reps, but that's where it's at now. And so it seemed like it was, you know, in the end, when I talked with Nick Chucky and Heather Joseph about it. It ended up naming a lot of service work that I was doing already. So it was useful that way. I'm thinking that the goal sort of with this particular VPO is to see all of the ways that licensing contracts and privacy and infrastructure and sort of how all the conversations that were having are really running in parallel. So that's what I'd like to do. Yeah. I think it probably is all running in parallel with the job itself. So you have your regular job at GVSU and then how much time is the VPO? Is it like the time sharing agreement with your employer or is it like over the 40 hours? I've always been curious how these kind of positions work. So there's how they're written to work and then what's happening in practice, right? So for me it's basically a donation of what would be different forms of service. And for the VPO's it can range. Mine is 20%. So about a day out of my work week. But so much of the work that I would be doing over.

relapse with my job, that, you know, those percentages are a little bit more fuzzy in my case than they might be for someone coming from outside of tech services or collection management. But that's how that works. There's an agreement that runs through my appointing officer and also with Spark on their end. And we sort of work out what portions of the day or what portions of my time that ends up being. It's about eight hours a week of time to the organization. Yeah. So it's similar to like developers for open source projects, things like people who develop D-Space, things like that. Right. Yeah. Like, D-Space, folio, those kinds of things, it would be really similar to that.

Yeah, it would be nice if all my service was kind of just like compiled into one thing that would actually be. I'm kind of spearheading a conference right now, and it's kind of annoying that I'm only a committee chair, given how much work I've put into it. So it's not going to look that great on my CV. But maybe that means next year I get to be on the steering committee or something. So we'll see what happens. But I'm always curious how to wiggle my way into stuff like this. Yeah, I think it was a gradual process for me. I started to, I think I got picked up by one of the OpenCon community calls, which is also, you know, a project that Spark isn't pretty heavily involved with. And I think that's how I showed up on their radar. So I think those sort of related and affiliated stuff. And I sort of slowly moved further, you know, further on people's radars and things just because I started to become more visible, I think, you know, in that particular. space. It's not a thing they teach you how to do in library school. No, it is not, but just like negotiation isn't, right? But that is, you know, I think something is figuring out, you know, what the, what the network is and what it looks like and maybe how to get there. I just got very

lucky, I think, in that instance where finally it seemed like I said, here is a thing that I do. And if you want me to do it, it seems like you won't, for example, hire me to do something, be really excited about the skills I might bring in and then completely berate and demean that same skill set when I show up, not that that's happened to anybody here. But it's just nice to have that alignment, I guess. Yeah. When you, when we're just saying they don't teach you this in library school, you're actually working on a grant that's awarded from the IMLS on developing negotiations education with, I think it was I, I always forget, IUP, yeah, what is it? It's so long. I, UPUI, Aye. Okay. Yeah. Same front and back. Okay. Yeah. I believe they use Ui Pui, which I could never get out reasonably. So I say the whole acronym. And then Belmont University as well. I'm working with Catherine Macy and Courtney Frizzan on putting that together and developing an OER around it just because the need is there so much. And we can lean on library school quite a bit in terms of when they've been responsible for really great education. And,

also when they've been completely culpable as degree mills, you know, both of those things can be absolutely true. And this was something where I think, you know, the group of us decided it's, it's not going to be their job. It has to, you know, be people who are in and then have recently graduated or who are sort of being given this. Here, we know this is a thing now. How do we do it? Just working from that kind of deficit is awfully difficult on these sorts of projects, but we're trying to marshal all of it and and make it more possible for us to go negotiate. Yeah, it's so, it's so strange when these things are so new and yet there's such a resistance to hiring and training new people, I think, because it's just the experience is

missing and people just aren't confident about training librarians. There's just kind of a discussion on Twitter the other day. People were talking about the MLS and not wanting to train new employees like you have to. And so I, you know, I had a real tough time getting my first job, my first job. two years in. I know a lot of other people have too, but I saw a job that was a Scalcom job that just got reposted because I guess no one qualified that applied for it. So they had to redefine the job into an entry level position. And I was like, you know, I felt a little vindicated by that every time I see that happen. I'm like, yeah, it shouldn't

have been that hard to get my foot in the door for even a specialization like collections or scholarly communications. You still need a pathway in there. And it just doesn't always exist. I get a version of this email occasionally. I've started to notice about once every six months I'll get a version of an email from somebody fairly high up in their library's administration saying, why can't we hire for this position? Why aren't we getting the pool we want? What are we doing wrong? And probably 90% of the time there are problems like, well, this is three jobs. And you have added these things into the required that I can name the people. who have that skill, you know, that I'm aware of. And it's such a small group of people, what are, you know, or even putting it on preferred. And I said, if we really look at what the work is, what the work of collections is, it's a huge amount of cultural work and relationship building. And if that's going to happen anyway, then do you really need someone, you know, who has the requisite three to five or two to three years of experience? Or do you need someone who, that ends up being

your job talk? Tell us how you figure out the culture. How do you make this work? kind of things. They've reposted and have since been able to fill the position because it's not, you know, collections and e-resources and, hey, here are five liaison roles that we need. So that would be great if you could fill that too and also be our assessment librarian and all these kinds of things that happen. Jay, I've already mentioned in other episodes about how tech services and that sort of the broad bucket of what goes into tech services has been absolutely gutted to the point where it's just you end up seeing these jobs where you're looking for the hybrid from Battlestar Galactica, and that's going to run our, that's just going to be our back-at-the-house stuff.

I think some of the more horrifying things that I have heard about the utility of libraries or people who should know better really asking questions about why we need staff have been generally directed at technical services. So it's been interesting and fascinating and horrifying to watch that happen over time. But there'll be this wave. We're almost due for another one of a bunch. of people looking for e-resources, which, by the way, sounds like we discovered fire. I hate that we call it electronic resources. It's just there has to be something different or better.

Collection strategist is kind of getting there, but does have that sort of business language stuff in it that I can't stand, but also know that it has a particular currency. But anyhow, it's almost there. We're almost due for another, oh, God, we need an e-resources person, wave. It's interesting to watch every time, and who consistently keeps posting those jobs. I have been both incredibly lucky in my professional career getting jobs, as well as have the reason that I've gotten incredibly lucky was also that I've had a really hard time. Because I specialize in, like, you know, cataloging and metadata in grad school with a really nice mixture of theory and practice. But, you know, there were no cataloging or metadata graduate assistantships. And I did a practicum.

And so when I was applying for like cataloging jobs and whatnot in academia, I just wasn't getting them because they didn't have the experience, especially not with specific ILSs or hadn't been batch loading as if that's something you need to learn in grad school, right? You could teach someone that in lesson and afternoon. And my first job was a residency. And most residencies are more public services focused, right? they're like often reference or instruction. Every once in a one, you'll get a specialized one. And this was a sort of jack of all traits. And I did get some metadata and even like I did some archival processing in that one.

And I published two articles about metadata in that time. And then when I went, you know, when that job was over and I went to apply for jobs, I had such a hard time that I was unemployed in living in a hotel for a few months and living off the good graces of Violet sharing my like co-fund me around, right? I remember when that happened. Mm-hmm. And the job that at like, you and H when they hired me, like, they knew I didn't have all the experience they were looking for.

I had someone tell me like, because I hadn't done any discovery stuff before. And they were like, yes, you have. I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, you've done instruction having you? And you've used it as a patriot, haven't you? And I was like, oh, God damn it, you're right. I know what it's like to use it on the front end. And so therefore on the back end,

I would actually know what to think of and stuff. And that was the angle I took for the discovery part of the metadata and discovery. And that job took a risk on me. But they saw that like, okay, yeah, I hadn't done like Primo before, but neither had any of them because it was new to all of them. And they cared more about like, I obviously had like the drive and the ambition and kind of like the creativity for it. instead of having all of the absolute skills that they were looking for, the job obviously did not work out for me in the long run, but not because I didn't have the skills for it. I picked up Primo pretty

easily. And my position now, like, I'm a library director now. I mean, granted, library director means only librarian. So I'm de facto the director. But it's of a music library. It's a conservatory. I don't have any degrees in music. I'm not a musicologist. I wasn't even allowed to take the music library job in grad school when I wanted to because I don't have a music degree, even though I had worked in a music library in undergrad, by the way. And this position didn't require a music degree. And, you know, I was very upfront with them that, like, I very much do sort of have like a jack of all trades experience, but that like my main training and stuff was in metadata and that there are things in this, you know, there are more things than metadata in this job, including like budgets and shit.

And they obviously could see I had never done that. And they hired me anyway with the full realization that they're also retooling the position. And so that it might be bumpy for a little bit because everyone's adjusting and I'm learning as I go. And they knew that. All of my positions have been like, we know this is new or that we're redoing it. And so we know it's going to be bumpy and that you're going to be learning. And I think the reason why I've had I had trouble getting other jobs was because places weren't willing to look beyond that, oh, you don't have the exact skill set we're looking for. buy, see ya. Like not enough places or like, yeah, like you can just train someone, but also like,

you have to be willing to take a risk sometimes on, on people and risk it being a little bumpy for a few months, maybe up to a year as everyone's adjusting and figuring things out. Because everyone, no matter how much experience you have, is going to have to learn something and figure things out because no two jobs are the same, even if you're in the same field. And I don't think places realize that risk is always part of it. that was my spiel. No, no, no. It's absolutely the case. And I think that there's something kind of, there's something kind of insidious, I think, about the way that hiring committees and hiring in academia, but in particular, in libraries, will, will function in that we, instead of saying fit,

so you have this, you have this group of people who tend to end up on search committees who know that they can't say fit anymore because, because it's such a dog whistle. So now, you know, they're smart enough to know that they can't say that anymore. And so we'll say things like, oh, well, they would just, this particular candidate would need more support, right? But when you're smart enough to know that you can't say fit anymore, but then aren't, you know, with it enough to build any kind of support that your existing employees probably need because onboarding isn't just a moment. It happens all time. Especially in tech services where things change so quickly. I know. And The ask for specific software is increasingly ridiculous to me because you have to go,

you know, get certified anyway. That's where your initial communities are going to be. So who has the interest and again, the creativity to go in and problem solve as opposed to someone who has all of their Primo and Alma certifications and has never thought critically once about the ILS or its role in how we deliver knowledge to students. So it's a question of who you want. and whether or not the risk is even measurable when we're talking about hiring for creativity and back of the house sort of jobs. Yeah, my job's kind of weird in that we have a pretty solid group of tech services people, but they're very much not mentored very well.

So it's kind of very lucky that our tech services group is as strong as it is. Just it really seems by accident. We always have to hire people in from building them up. there's a certain amount of understanding that, like, we're training you on the job because, like, people don't move here. Yeah, that's understandable. Or if they move here, they'll move away eventually, you know, in four or five years, you know. And so, oh, I was going to say that when you're learning how to apply for those first jobs,

it's kind of like bartending in that you just lie about your experience to a certain extent because there's no other way to be like, oh, I took a class on this and that's going to help. Like, that's not going to do anything for you. You just have to be like, oh, I have worked with this, obviously, because you just have to think creatively about how you've worked with it. Or be kind of vague about your extent of admin control you had over the software or whatever it is. A certain amount of, you know, sort of case making that goes into it, like the spinning of, well, I've experienced it as a user and having somebody respond with,

you know, that was a really creative way to answer the question. And so what you're not really being assessed on in that moment is your ability realized on paper or not. It's how well you were able to answer the question, which again is a them problem. Our situation at my library has been pretty lucky in the sense that the main ways that we kind of recruit are people who are already working in the library, who are doing library degrees, or people who are doing their practicum who come to us for like the summer before they graduate. and we get to kind of see like, oh, do we want to hire this person? And it's, you know, that's how we've gotten a few people, like really good people, because you just get to see how good or not they are at adapting to, you know, or what interests they have and just go, oh, they would fit perfectly doing this.

That's how we got our OAR librarian. And they're amazing. So we got really lucky with that. Going back to collections, though, or negotiations and collections. With the IMLS grant, oh, come on, man. fucking people rev in their cars outside my window all day and night. With the grant that you're doing, what's the OAR outcomes? Like, is it going to be like one text?

Is it going to be a series of courses? Is it going to be a program that's affiliated with the universities that are creating it? Like, how is, how are you imagining the final product of it's going to be? So it'll be a, it'll be a course. It'll be sort of distributed and hosted in a couple of different places. But we are going to maintain a centralized landing page for it through a, through Spark is going to design and host the landing page. For a lot of the resources that will get produced,

they'll include case studies that are heavily fictionalized from people's experiences trying to do this kind of work. And creating a lot of learning modules around a few different aspects of what members of the community have asked for. So we're going to hold three different forums. Those will go out. Information about those will go out soon. And I'll be sure to send it over.

that we'll sort of look at different things about how what you're doing when you negotiate a contract really determines a lot of how you get to use the resource. And so we can talk about privacy all we want. We can talk about all these things that we claim are values. But ultimately those relationships play out in the contract. And so without a strong one, without one that protects or even manages or acknowledges the relationship between the third-party vendor and the library, you're going to have some difficulty. And so what we'd like, I think, for the outcome to be for the grant is to have a resource that does get built and added on to so that people can figure out where they're starting from. If that's, we need to figure out what values we want to have represented in our contract language, like the work that Syracuse has done, some of the works that I've done with the collection development policy here locally and locally and lots of other sort of value-based projects. We see more of that around privacy and surveillance. and a lot of the more, I think, intense conversations that I've had with not necessarily administrators here, but in other positions where I've had to say, we have to object to this about money, we can't object to it about privacy or a vendor releasing what we're defining as PII, because here's all the other agreements you told me we had to arrange that absolutely hand over a ton of information about our users. You can't get riled up because Safari changed their authentication or O'Reilly or whatever it's calling.

itself now. Taco Bell. It will all be Taco Bell. We'll all be acquired by Clarivate someday and we'll have one invoice. One invoice. Don't curse Taco Bell like that. Oh, I know. Right. I'm at the combination, Clarivate and Taco Bell. Don't you put that out in the world, Justin. Don't you do that to me. I'm sure that it already has happened, right? No, Taco Bell. I'm at the Clarivate. I'm at the Taco Bell. I love Taco Bell too much. Don't do that to me. If you ruin Trunch wraps for me because of this. That's it. I can't. Anyway. I have to have my cheesy bean and rice burritos. Like, I kind of will shrivel up if I don't have one a week. It's just, them's the facts. It'll be a reception catered by Taco Bell, sponsored by Clarivate. That's what'll happen. I'm going to shut my laptop. Oh, for God's sake, no. Now that thoughts in the universe. I'm so sorry. Because I've wanted to kind of have a contract negotiation framework in terms of like, here's what we want.

going forward. So we can tell people, we have a policy now that means we don't want these things like non-disclosure agreements. We don't want these privacy infringing agreements. And the more I've toyed with the idea, the more I realize that negotiations are really outside of our hands as a university because so much of it is consortial. I mean, how are people dealing with that? So I think it depends. A lot of it has to do with sometimes you have a, you know, know, sort of a consortia that functions as a buying club. And I think that that's been the model for consortia for a long time. And you're seeing more of, I think, consortia that are either by design with something like, say, California, you know, where you get into sort of big state school

consortia places or, you know, SUNY is another example where you're going to start to lean a little bit more have the value discussion earlier than a lot of other places would where it's still kind of a buying club. Well, we can get, you know, a 4% increase instead of a 6% one and we're going to call that a good deal and outsource a lot of the expertise to consortia, which may or may not work as effectively, is it good for us? I don't know that I, if I have signed a deal at the consortia level, that is as good or better than something I could have gotten. But it's also interesting to see kind of looser organizations and that they are more project-based and not so much the buying club model. You look at something like Ivy Plus Confederational Libraries and it's more,

what are the projects that all of us can do together rather than being let's get the best deal on the thing that we all agree to buy. And so it involves, I think, a different set of, a different skill set and a different kind of expertise when you're talking about getting a bunch of people in the same consortia together to decide what our values are going to be and kind of get at the statement that you're talking about. Like, Neurl's Better Deal was, you know, one of the first public statements that they've made in, I don't know, at least 10 years. But it's because it was sort of a sleepier buyers club price is going to be what we pay attention to on this sort of consortia. And now you've got people that are interested in saying, in saying things more explicitly and saying, here's, we need to have more equitable terms. This is not sustainable. And the future is going to be shared.

at least in the immediate sense. They're not going to be able to completely pivot 100% to data analytics. It depends. And I think the only way that you get the superactive people involved in the consortia is, again, by leaning on more labor that we don't necessarily have time for because there's less people. And people are sort of focusing their priorities in, and they're either going to be values aligned or not.

And say, you know, kind of like University of North Texas brings this up, too, in their expectations for vendors document, which is one of the first things. like it to actually come out and say, here's what we're wanting to sign. It's literally saying, here's how to do business with us and still, you know, having to fight for more equitable stuff. So I don't mean to give you a lawyerly answer back, but that's where we're at. I love me a lawyerly answer. I should have been a lawyer in another life. It's my worst trait. You still can. Lots of, lots of JDMLS out there. Speaking of jobs that don't need a JD.

but I did see one that was like a head of Skalcom that required a JD, which I thought was very strange. I walked through parts of like Harvard Commons and have it yet a lot now. Will I get one by osmosis? Like I can pretend I'm illegally blonde. Will that work? Yeah. Yeah, that should work, right?

Or happy death day. I don't know that one. Is that at Harvard? Oh, it's a horror movie where it's like Groundhog Day except the lady's getting murdered. And so she gets to figure out who her killer is. It's like every day she wakes up. in a dorm room and then, like, no, she's going to get killed. I watched, like, it was it Polish or Ukrainian or Czech or something?

Film like that at Sundance in 2020, which is a sentence I just said called Coco D. Cocoa Day. It's on shutter I saw, and it's like a Groundhog Day. And it was one of those where it's like people were going like, oh, come on in the theater. And some people were starting to walk out. And then all of a sudden, like, ah, and then everyone was just like, yeah, because I'd like try to figure it out every day. I've never been in a rowdier screening of something before it rolled.

Yeah, I mean, we have a coalition in Texas that the library coalition for United Access that was put together to renegotiate hell severe contracts. And that got put together and then just immediately shut out all the Skalkan people. And so it was pretty much centrally negotiated and really only the deans were in on it. And because it was a huge coalition, I mean, I, you know, you could only expect so much. But even with the biggest coalition ever, I think, for a negotiation like this, Elsevere just out negotiated them and split the pot and gave like half of them a better deal and half of the more worst deal. I mean, it's still like active, but I mean, like, I'm in their discord. I don't see any like action happening in there.

I don't see anyone really talking. So like there's collections people pulled in, but it's, it just seems like it failed. And so I just wonder, I probably saw U&T's framework for vendor agreements or whatever it's titled. And that was where I got the idea to do one at my university. But I still am kind of locked out of a lot of the contract process unless it's something I'm specifically overseeing like B Press or I think even B Press. I didn't even see the full contract for a while. It just went straight to our contract people. Like press books and a couple other things where I actually got to see it before we sent

off. And I imagine that sort of thing, going back to our discussion like last week about just vendor tech services labor of like lib guides becoming this, this massive thing that libraries are sort of sunk into paying for. Yeah. I've had conversations with a couple of folks who have moved into, you know, sort of new subject area responsibilities. And one of the things that they're consistently told is, well, you can work on lib guides, right? It becomes this, thing that if you're not sure how to orient yourself in a position, it becomes the thing, well, you inherited these lib guides, so it's time for you to go fix them when, or to otherwise look at them when, you know, without necessarily looking at any of the data behind it,

one of the things that I've talked with a liaison here about was, here is the data from all of the things, at least that we have access to or that we can reasonably point at as being kind of accurate because use data is weird in that particular discipline and say, you know, here's what's happening. Here's how much of that is getting used on which particular lip guides, because you have to figure out how to focus your attention. People will spend so much time and attention on something that they're not even using as a shortcut for themselves, you know, sort of in the way that you're mentioning about if I only have 20 minutes in a classroom. Here's a short link. Here's everything I'm going to cover. You can, you know, sort of come with me.

But people will spend a truly intense amount of labor maintaining these things that I don't know have the utility that we want them to. So it's, it's been interesting to watch them get bigger and more springy, as it were. And, and a lot of it, too, is, you know, some places will need the full suite of things that that particular vendor offers because campus IT is so deeply hostile to the idea of somebody having a password or maybe, you know, maintaining a webpage that has, you know, information about the library on it, that they're so, or, you know, the university marketing has gotten in there, and they're so aggressively controlling the way that the branding comes out. And if you don't have the same font, then you're not going to, you know, all these, you know, kind of rules and

restrictions, or we're going to insist on really bad U.X kind of things that can happen where all those interests collide. And of course, if you tell campus IT how library contracts work or how library systems work, they sort of look at you, like you've grown a second or third head because no other software functions like this, you know, we're in the same way. Or you'll have someone say, wait, is it just an inventory system? Well, yes. And there are these things called Mark Records. And you know, by the way, our search is managed by an invisible, pretty crappy, you know, algorithm that can't even catch up to the current ingest of Wikipedia kind of kind of things, which by the way, we're paying thousands of dollars for and devote at least one staff

member's labor to. So it's just kind of, it's interesting to watch all of that happens. So I understand why Springshare has developed in the way that it has. And again, there's an advocacy piece there. There's a identity piece. There's an owning any sense of expertise piece there. And that if we did that more confidently as a group in our organizations, we might get a lot farther. But at the same time, I've seen some really horrible lib guides. And I think if I looked at the systems that people were allowed into, and then those people asked me, can we design our own? Can we maintain our own? I would probably say no, and with really good reason, and point at a bunch of terrible lib guides to justify it. So it's interesting to watch where we're gaining agency and where we might kind of lean on those things more as a group.

I don't like the idea of necessarily leaving consortia as a solution, but I do need the negotiators in consortia generally to be a lot more assertive than they have been and to do the facilitation that it takes to get us least on the same page about anything at all, even if it's the iterative stuff, like we're just not going to have an NDA. That's it. That's the goal for this round, right? any number of other things about, I don't know, threat metrics is sitting in the back of Science Direct. Like, why the hell is that? Any of these other things, like, we don't have to go 100% every goal all the time, although it would be useful to come out of the gate swinging more often. But just starting from anywhere would be helpful in a lot of these places that are just sort

of strictly buyers clubs. Yeah, I mean, that was kind of my feeling with the Texas Consortium was, I felt that the negotiator didn't understand why. you need such a huge consortium to go against Delcevere? They just saw, okay, well, here's a contract. I want a better contract. We're going to have more leverage to get a better contract rather than seeing, like, the way we do scholarly communication is broken in a lot of fundamental ways, and the way that our relationships with these vendors are broken.

And that's something we're going to realign. It didn't, I don't think, ever occur to them, you know, in terms of, you know, as bad as transformative agreements where we didn't need even get a good transformative agreement out of it. We didn't even get APCs covered. So it was like, you know, I mean, it just was a lose-lose. I just felt like they were completely routed and it just got out maneuvered. You have a note in here about precarious jobs and residences that are strategic.

Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, a little. And I'm sorry for not being a little bit more, I guess with it. I don't, I don't ever do podcasts. So, you know, once you edit out all the terrible things I've said because I'm tired, I will. Have you listened to this podcast? I have listened to this podcast, but I'll get in trouble.

I take us on journeys that we never come back from. It's fine. All right. I'll try to feel better about it. So I have noticed job postings for the people who get in, and I understand that funding for positions is funding for positions and you need to get them in. I have seen more residency type and visiting type positions that have strategy in them, that have something to do with project management or strategic planning or, you know, all of these

other things that are just huge multi-year cultural initiatives. And most work in libraries is that. So really all residences are kind of inadequate that way. And I understand they set people off in the right direction. Three years is not enough to, I think, establish the kind of relationships you need in order to get at that kind of work. And so, you know, I forget where it was that posted that they wanted this basically, I don't know, some sort of strategic engagement, something or other. And it was, you know, again, this sort of term limited two and a half year appointment, which realistically, you only get maybe 18 months of work because you were moving and adjusting to moving if it's not remote. And of course, it's not remote because that always goes against the branding of these

places. God forbid we have anybody remote working. And then you were spending the last section of that frantically looking for other employment, right, because you're in this. So there's no way that you're ever really focused on the work, except for that weird midpoint where people are still figuring out if they want to trust you. And I was really surprised to see something that critical attached to an inherently precarious position and just sort of wondered, is it for pools, are we going to get a different type of person? Is this a, are we going to hopefully transition it into something that's full time? How is this going to work? But it's just not clear from where it's sitting. So I've always, or someone will come on and be, well, you'll be the diversity initiative librarian or something like that.

and it's kind of, no, this work actually belongs to everyone. Maybe they could do literally anything else, so we stop burning through people who take on those jobs. But I've seen more of that lately, and it's really distressing. Also, Eamintool just tweeted this out recently since he's head of something, I want to say research and instruction at Columbia. And he'd mentioned that Columbia had posted internships where they were paying 20 bucks an hour and it was remote.

And I want to say it was for a year. I don't remember the details exactly $400. applications to that job. Only some of those are because it's Columbia. More of those are because it's remote, 100%. And I think the other thing that's happening is this sense of what work absolutely needs to be done face-to-face when we do have a meeting. Why are we having it? More of those questions are being asked. And I think the answers are really revealing a lot of people. It's real positions on things like disability. And I think are also very revealing about why they come to work. One of the conversations I had in the before time before the pandemic was,

I remember telling somebody, well, I was going to Australia at the time, speaking at VALA, which no one who's listening to this podcast will believe, but it in fact happened. And I was stunned and amazed and I said, I'm going to be gone for this amount of time doing this once in a lifetime thing. And everybody who heard that, you know, really got nervous about the fact that I wouldn't be available. And this sort of continued on, and it continued pretty intensely whenever anyone would take time off or take vacation or anything like that, if you tended to not adhere to the sort of Puritan Calvinist weird work ethic of you have to be at work from this time to this time, because this time of day is inherently more moral, you know, than other times. And if you work, show up later and

work later, it's somehow you're less than and sort of, you know, dealing with that. And so finally, I just said, okay, so if work only happens at my actual desk and my actual cube, in my actual space, then that means that I'm not going to answer emails at home anymore. And they were not pleased with that at all. I said, well, if it's not real work, then I'm not capable of answering emails at home. I have to wait until I get to my desk. I have to wait until I do all those things. And yeah, not pleased with that.

So it's interesting to see who is relying on presentism to sort of enforce their, their weird idea about what it means to be a leader or a manager or an administration. So I don't know why it means that I have to be observed at all time. in some spaces and not in others. Yeah. It was a lot for that bullet point, sorry. No. I mean, that's kind of the crux of the issue, right?

Because I worry about this a lot as someone who supervises people. The temporary positions, that's something I worry about with, because I'm working on a big grant for the first time, and it'll be like a three-year grant. And part of it is I only want to take part in it if we can hire a librarian position for it, which would, of course, only be 10. temporary because the odds of us moving it into, I mean, we would hopefully be able to move it

into a full-time position. You know, three years later, we'll know it's coming. And we also, you know, have this whole thing, like I said, about building our talent because we know people aren't going to move here. So, I mean, hopefully it would work out, but I still get really nervous about the idea that we would move one of our MLS people out of a library associate job into a temporary grant-funded job. That associate position would get filled and then they're out of a job in three years. And so it makes me really nervous to do any kind of temporary hire like that where you know the deadline's coming. But to do it for like operations absolutely necessary stuff is just the risk to the organization. But I mean, I don't care about the organization as much as people not getting screwed over because, you know, we can we can delegate work in different ways if we have to.

The organization will be fine. Right. And I think it's something to consider when we do want to grow people and be responsible for and kind of shepherd the development a little bit more. is what happens when those term limited positions end, if they're being hired internally. Can there be any kind of assurance that assuming everything's fine? Also, it would mean not necessarily losing that position either. Instead of giving this particular staff line back to the university, can we keep it in reserve or have the guarantee that a line like it gets returned to the library

at this point in order to provide some level of security? Well, I think in our position it would be we would have to fill it as soon as possible with someone else so that we don't lose it. Because otherwise the staff money would get swiped. And so there would be someone else in that position as soon as possible if we were lucky enough to get a hire before that's lost. But yeah, negotiations need strong, scholarly communications experts, frameworks like control digital lending, demand strong search and principled metadata. One of the things that I'm doing with Spark and one of the things that is, I think, going to be important. important when we're talking about broader strategy on the IMLS grant is that if we're going to do negotiation well, it doesn't occur in a vacuum. We need a lot of data from different sources,

information and experience and being able to create those kind of scenarios and decide, okay, well, we're going to look at this as not just one collection, but our whole relationship of the vendor. What does that mean? And so for me, I'm really lucky, you know, to have Matt Ruin and the other scholarly communications folks at GVSU because it meant that my entire negotiation around digital commons was informed by all of that work and also all of the sort of positioning of value and what it is that we're willing to to kind of throw down about and be able to come from a place of strength and say this is what we're willing to do, this is what we're not. And so negotiations by nature need that strong. You know, Skalkam informed present.

Because if you're not having those conversations with faculty, if you're not having those conversations about what we're doing is or isn't sustainable anymore, then it's just going to be too much of a shock to the system. If the library hasn't been positioned as an expert in its own collection, if we haven't done these things or we've had a terribly run process, like we see so many cancellations are just badly run, sort of like the situation you might be alluding to in Texas, then it won't be as strong and it won't be as impactful as it might have been. When we look at Kyle Courtney talking about, here's all of the quivers and the, all of the arrows in the quiver thing, metaphor that he's really fond of using. If we're going to implement something like controlled digital lending, we need really strong, reliable search experiences that we manage and control. And we need principled people doing metadata and thinking broadly about how do we get this out there.

How do we make things findable? And so all of these conversations end up happening sort of in parallel. And that we've got something winding through shared governance right now that we'll state explicitly that OER, if it meets certain criteria, will count in a particular category of scholarship for you if you are pre-tenure or going up for full, which for teaching faculty is going to be a huge one for us. I think I shouldn't rely on early career scholars' comfort level in how they want to argue their tenure case or their renewal case to determine whether or not OER is scholarship at your particular institution. It's got to come from a lot of different places. But if you're not having a lot of those discussions, if you're not talking about privacy and open access and infrastructure that all this stuff runs on and that you need to appropriately staff it, then every decision that comes out of any kind of negotiations ends up being a shock. You know, it's just like weeding, right? You never do it all at once, or if you do have to have some big catastrophic weeding project, then you hear stories about people bringing up the book dumpster at night and then filling it so that people won't see it and freak out because people have their weird container fetish thing about, oh, my God, you're throwing books away. So I don't know. I think that unless it's done thoughtfully, it just sort of collapses in on itself. That's part of what the VPO is going to do, hopefully, is see all of those different opportunities and figure out how do we take them and how might we move together better? Because I don't know, especially when we talk about things like platforms, I don't know that I guess I don't want to say bravery or courage. I don't know maybe that the will is there to move, say, Alma in a reasonable direction.

Just like I don't know that the will is there to get OCLC to move in a reasonable direction in terms of what it means to be a member body. But that's going to happen when you have an organization like that that has the research arm and then the business arm often sort of hitting each other in the same organization. But that's starting to happen a lot. And you would think that they would have it sorted out by now. But the lawsuit's very strange. It should be interesting to see what else comes out of it. Yeah. We'll have to do a follow-up episode whenever that. If anything interesting happens, I think it might peter out. But if something interesting happens, that'll be fun. Also, like Pearson getting into NFTs, they've basically pulled in like a new CEO who's just like an NFT dude.

Yeah, my God. Why? Which is really like great time to jump on the bandwagon. But I really hope they do what the video game company Square Enix did, which is they sold off all of their IPs, like Tomb Raider and like all these big name games. And they just threw it all into NFTs and they're losing all their money. And I just hope Pearson does that too, because that would just be pretty funny. And good for the textbook market. Did you see, I think, I want to say it's on TikTok that there are a couple of students that are sitting on a Pearson handle and are just squatting on it because they're angry about how much they had to pay in textbooks this year.

That's awesome. Yes. Which is great. One of the best emails I ever got was, can we get them on? You should ask. I should find that tweet. I mean, it's just TikTok at Pearson. So, yeah, we can do it.

But, yeah, I'm sure it is. So I got an email while, while it was being finalized and it was. the worst to not be able to tweet or talk about it, but when Spark bought inclusive access and just sat on it to say, here's what's actually happening with those agreements. And I thought, this is amazing. We need to do more of that kind of activism. And I was excited to see it. And I'm always excited to see it from students. But so, yeah, more students need to go sit on on textbook domains on social media. God, what is the Pearson's TikTok going to do anyway? Besides be incredibly dorky. I'm going to go squat Al-Severe on Truth

social.com. I mean, isn't that basically what AJ's been doing? Yes. AJ, come back on. He was an early guest. I think I've been a bad influence on him in terms of his Twitter behavior. I mean, by bad, you'd be amazing, right? He's pulling like a Djibuki.

Oh, man. I wonder if we could get Djibuki to do Pearson tweet. Oh, that'd be fun. Yeah. We should get those kids on. Get them on. Yeah, that'd be fun. Work your magic.

You're good at. making us make friends. Yeah. Chuck Tingle still doesn't DM me back, so it doesn't always work. Most of the time it's worked. It works the surprising amount of times. Yeah. But need ideas for a new book title. Maybe he'll do it, right?

Oh, yeah, maybe. Yeah, I can AI generate some new ones. That's what you could do. We could do like a, what is it, it's a Chuck Tingle or not, Tingle or Fingle. It'd be like, what is it? Not a Divine Corpse. What's the art thing where you do like? Like, no, where it's like someone will do something and then you cover it and then the next person does something and cover it.

It's like a divine corpse or. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, it's something corpse drawing where somebody draws the head, someone draws the torso and someone draws the legs. But you don't get to see what the other person is done. Yeah. And it doesn't just have to be a corpse, but like it can be anything, but it's like three parts. But like we could do that where like me, Justin and Sadie each like have to come up with a part of a Chuck Tingle book title.

I call the Pounded in the butt part and I get to decide if it's pounded the butt or if it's something else. Pounded in the dick. Pounded in the dick, yeah. I was just saying that people should say, I was thinking this earlier today, but I couldn't get the tweet right. But I think people should say crushing dick more. I feel like that should just become a thing people say. I like it. Yeah.

Can that be like our official like tagline of library punk? Library punk crush and dick. Crush and dick. A leftist library worker podcast. That's fantastic. Yeah. Truly. So, Scarlett, you did put one thing at the very end, which might be fun to talk about.

But I... Sure. You had a student thing. Did you ever re-find the thread of your train of that, potentially? No, it was something about like, you know, if students were interested in doing a collections job. I mean, it's kind of a more mid, it's not really something you do as an entry level job, really, I don't think. It feels like something like you've got to be at the right place at the right point in your career to really have control over either a certain amount of budget

or to be in a specialized position. I just feel like there's, but do you have any advice for people who are interested? So I looked out quite a bit as far as my search went. By the time I had moved into academic libraries, I was pretty solidly, you know, come from a resource sharing. background. So as a staff member while I was working and doing my MLIS and working nights, which I do not advise. They'd started that originally all the way back. When I was in undergrad, I'd done a kind of an internship in special collections and did not think about it ever again, and no one suggested working in libraries to me, which is a good thing because that was back in, I don't know, I think 2007 or 2008. So not good things would have happened, I think, if I had entered

in at that time. But after that, I was just sort of always interested in, how we're looking up things and how we're sort of passing through information, or rather how information sort of passes over and through people, I think sort of as an artifact of having a really analog childhood and then getting to about middle school when there were suddenly grants for Max in classrooms. And suddenly they were sort of everywhere. So I have this really analog experience as a kid. And then going to college had a very, you know, sort of, and now here's mosaic. And it's going to change how you think about information. But so kind of starting out out there, I've always sort of had the background. And I think a lot of people, this is a rambly answer to your question, and I think a lot of people

took a chance on somebody who was really interested in solving problems and thinking through sort of downstream effects of what a decision might mean. And it's not that you, I think, don't do that when you're in other spaces in the library, but I think it's absolutely the undercurrent of the work is trying to figure out a way to do. do it better. So you sort of become a daft punk song when you're working in in tech services. And I think that it's such a generous group of people, too, who are always trying to work within the constraints they have to make sure everybody can get on with their stories. We don't know why people come into the library. We know some sense about it, but we want to make the thing that

they're interacting with better. It doesn't always mean getting rid of the seams. And so I think that orientation toward problem solving and that actionable curiosity is probably what I look for more than anything when I'm looking at students or when I'm looking at people applying for jobs like that is sort of keeping the possible in front of mind and then figuring out what are the rules of my system, which of those can I bend, which of those can I take apart, and which of those can I meaningfully get others to advocate for when we talk about changing it. So I think that's what I look at in terms of characteristics. It's definitely a job that people sort of find themselves in and I wish that we were more friendly to crossing over for people who want to move,

you know, maybe out of liaison or subject area jobs into tech services. I think there's some definitely applicable things there. And also for people who might absolutely devastate in a classroom that we think can't for whatever reason because, you know, we've been in collections the whole time. So some of it is luck and some of it is, again, the orientation toward looking at a system and seeing what might be possible with it as opposed to, here's how it works. It's the only way that it works. And I'm going to do this thing I was taught and not investigate anything else because I'm afraid of breaking it. I don't know if that answers

your question at all. No, and I think that applies generally to most librarian positions, because you really don't want to just go in with the assumption that the system can't get any better or that the user experience can't improve. So do you want to plug anything like your Twitter or upcoming publications or do you want people to leave you alone? So people can, if they want to, follow me. I'm Panoptogoth on Twitter. I'm doing more work with the community of practice. So if your library is a member of Spark, you'll hear more about that in terms of what some plans are with respect to how do we get the thing done together and do it well and effectively. And if you're not a member of Spark, you should encourage someone in your administration to reach out.

We can do amazing things. We can do it collectively and together. We can build great big, ungodly things that help it all function, which at times feels like a ridiculous goal when we're sort of working in libraries during the slow collapse of everything, right? This is truly the worst apocalypse. There's not even zombies. And everything is going to happen to release slowly. And so I think we've got to align ourselves with the people who are doing the work and well. Spark is just a group of people. You can fit the entire organization around a table. and they're already able to accomplish more and do more than many other organizations. This time we support that kind of work and strength, no matter where it comes from.

Yeah. Now, Spark's a really good resource. It's a shame that it's so difficult to, well, it was difficult for me to get a sell on, on getting us as members, but it happened. I just had to be kind of tricky about how I did it. In terms of the market analysis that Spark puts out and the other things, the communities of practice that exist, and the other things that you don't have to be a member of SparkO,

but you can get involved with some of the professional development and stuff. So you should definitely, especially if you're a graduate student, looking to go into scholarly communications areas or collections areas or really any kind of instruction area as well because of the OER aspect. Would public library people get anything out of it? No, Spark's an academic organization as far as I know. I don't know that we have any members that are, that are in public libraries yet.

But, you know, I think interest about the kind of stuff that we're working on occurs in so many different places that it would be interesting to see, you know, public libraries as part of, you know, some of the kinds of initiatives that we're seeing out of organizations like this. So we'll see what happens. Scarlett, thanks for coming on. Good night.