librarypunk - 108 - Day in the Life of Justin

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Same thing as with Jay, but now featuring Justin. Also some news.  Discord: https://discord.gg/7WcvM7Xdq  Media mentioned https://www.applevalleynewsnow.com/news/court-blocks-push-to-close-dayton-library/article_b73f99a8-58bf-11ee-98ed-efcddf58abbd.html https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/26/fcc-announces-plans-to-reinstate-net-neutrality/

There's an aria in the opera Nixon in China called News. Because arias are titled, the naming convention is whatever the first line of the aria is, is the name of the aria, unless it gets a popular nickname. So the Queen of the Night aria, as it's often called, is Der Heller Rocha, because it's Dehle Rocha, you know, that one. You know, stuff like that. I am so sorry people who just heard me sing. I am not a soprano or a coloratura or anything like that. But yeah, there's one in Nixon and China called News, because the first line is just like,

news, news, news, news, news, news, news, news, news, news. It's a really good opera, actually. There's a song. Get a drop of that. Yeah, there's an aria by the wife of Mao. and she sings the aria about being the wife of Mao. It's pretty good. It's like the best aria in that show, I'd argue.

Everyone go watch Nixon in China. It's a good opera. Anyway. I'm Justin. I'm Skalkan Library. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay.

I am a music library director and my pronouns are he him. We got news. Speed run again. Good news this time. Good news news. If you had heard of the Dayton Library debacle in southwestern, southeastern Washington, excuse me, a conservative group wasn't satisfied with the library's response to basically the request to ban a whole bunch of books and instead turned around and tried to put closing the library district on the best. ballot. Only one library in the entire county. It's a tiny rural county, and they got enough signatures to put it on the ballot. A pack of citizens who did not want that to happen turned

around and sued both the county and the woman who led the whole thing. And the judge just cited with them and said, yes, this is illegal. But no, I think she said, this is unconstitutional. and if it wasn't, it would be illegal. Because, for one, because of the structure of the rural county library district, the people who lived in Dayton City proper, which is about two-thirds of the county, wouldn't be able to vote. So a third of the county would be deciding on whether or not the entire county gets to have a library, including the Dayton Library is inside Dayton City limits. so the people who use it wouldn't be able to vote for it.

So that was a mark against it. Very strongly, the judge was like, that's taxation without representation, and it shouldn't have gotten, shouldn't have gotten to the ballot to begin with. And, oh, and the judge took a look at it. The part about it being illegal is that the initial petition that was presented, two-thirds of the signatures were invalid. Oh, great. Yeah, so that itself should have made it so it didn't actually reach the ballot. Yeah, there is good cause to believe that there were persons that willfully and unlawfully engaged in fraud by giving deliberate misinformation regarding this petition, Carl, the judge said.

It is telling that in the initial petition presented two-thirds of the signatures were invalid. The court finds the declarations filed are persuasive, and that even if this petition could somehow overcome all of the legal and constitutional hurdles. There should be an investigation into the potential criminal acts engaged in to collect the signatures needed for the petition. So that was shot down pretty thoroughly. The judge was also very positive about keeping the library open on top of all of that. So I know this news story has gone around as the first attempt to close an entire library

district solely based on book bans. and it has failed. Yay! And I didn't even have to go to vote, which would have been absolutely terrible. So good news coming out of Washington, I am glad to report. Yeah, this was in my Good News Roundup, and then the other Good News Roundup I had, I had to take out because it was immediately undone by the Fifth Circuit. Oh, cool. Which was the one in Texas, the crazy judge in West Texas that everyone judge shops for was like,

No, you can't do this book censorship thing. And he was overturned within like a week. So I think he just knew that the Fifth Circuit was going to contradict him because he wants to keep doing his crazy anti-abortion rulings. Because he's the only judge in that district. So if you bring a suit there, you're guaranteed to get him. And he's like a fucking maniac. That's fantastic. Yeah.

Yeah. The thing also, rural library districts, it's like created as one, but it's within the city limits. and it's like really interesting thing about like county and city government. This is like a whole thing that was like big when they started making like home rule movements. There were a bunch of these in Florida. I think they happened all over the place in like the 60s and 70s, but like county and city governments just like merged because of shit like this where like one third of the county government wouldn't be taxed,

but they could vote on stuff. And if you lived in the city limits, you'd be double taxed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and within the case for. for Dayton, the city residents are taxed for the library district. Yeah. So, yeah, they wouldn't.

And they probably pay extra taxes in the city. Probably, yeah. So like county and city property taxes probably. But yeah, rural library districts are always interesting because several, a couple of the library systems I've worked for have passed similar things for capital budget reasons. So basically we recently passed one to get a new library in a community. And it created a rural library district or something to that effect in a place that's, I guess is technically a rural, but is actually contains a city limit. So yeah, it's it's always weird how those end up working out.

Yeah, I think it's a funding thing or something. Yeah, it's confusing as hell. But more good news out of the other Washington. The FCC plans on reinstating net neutrality rules. Yay. It's like a net jep-eye. Yeah. Fuck you, Reese's.

Stupid Reese's cop. God. And I say that as somebody who fucking loves Reese's. You fucking tainted it for me, you asshole. I love big mugs. I do too. But yeah, they finally got a fifth, what are they called? A fifth commissioner sworn in so they can actually.

start doing shit at the FCC. And one of the first things chairwoman is planning on doing is reinstating net neutrality rules as they were before the Trump administration. Yay. Can we get a W in the chat? Now the cyber is so big.

The cyber is so big now. That is absolutely true. You know what? He was cooking on that one. Yeah. I think the biggest issue for net neutrality is like mobile data. rates, right? Because that's usually where the fuckery happens, isn't it? Probably. Oh, yeah. And I'm not, I'm not entirely certain, but if I would, to speculate, I would say it would have to do, well, the towers thing. Who can use what towers is always.

Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, fucking wild. So, because they're usually privately owned, I think. They're not maintained. Yeah. And also, it was like the cable companies that own streaming services also run your internet. So they're they could charge you on your data caps for like Netflix, but not for their streaming services. And I was just reading about like net neutrality in other countries. And I think it's kind of like, yeah, certain websites, like it doesn't count against you if you use them. I think that's where the mobile stuff comes in the most.

Yeah. Well, I mean, telecom companies are, they're never just one thing now. It's like you can get internet or cable or your phone plan through, all through ComGast and Xfinity now. and yeah. So I think the distinction is going to become less and less practical among, you know, regular folk. Hopefully it will maintain, it will also do that for regulations like the FCC. So it doesn't matter if you're getting cable or internet or cell phone service. It all falls under

net neutrality rules. Yeah. I asked my train of thought because I was thinking about Amazon, because Amazon's got the Federal Trade Commission thing coming up. So there's going to be an investigation into their antitrust practices because they just choke supply lines all over the place and use anti-competitive size. So if you sell through Amazon, you have to pay extra to be prime eligible. And so that's an anti-competitive business practice because Amazon is also selling its own products through prime shipping

and promoting its own products to the top of the queue and stuff. like that. Yeah, I totally forgot where I was going with the FCC thing, though. We were doing Day in the Life of Justin. That's me. Hey, it's here. Hey, Justin. Long time to see. I'm doing this because I was trying to do an HVAC episode and that ended up being too much research. Seriously, HVAC. It'll get you every time. There's like three people talking about it on Blue Sky and I'm like, do I want to get them on? Do I want to just do this myself because it'll be easier to just, like, read, like, a bunch of articles?

We should get a facilities person on sometime, TBH. Yeah. I agree. That and also, I mean, I'm going to go with, like, a preservation studies stuff. Hmm. I started reading a study about, like, a, out-preservation. They were actually testing, like, how climate-controlled areas, like, affect things that are in boxes and things that are in, in, I guess on shelves.

And there's like not a whole lot of research of just doing research on how fluctuations impact it. It actually doesn't seem to be that bad big of a deal. Yeah. Yeah. I'll let shit. Like I know there's like some like preservation and conservation stuff that like like, like there's this one film preservation school and to get in,

you have to have a degree in chemistry. Like just to get into this program, you have to know chemistry for it. which like makes sense because it's like film. But yeah, that that shit is like, I think they need like, we need like wizards to work on HVax and to like, I don't know. I feel like magic would solve these problems. Anyway, Justin.

Yeah. What is your job title? Scholarly Communications Librarian. Cool. I didn't know if it was some like librarian of whatever, whatever strategy librarian. Like I like it when dog titles are short, speak to the point. Now, does your job description actually warrant you to probably have multiple

things in your title instead of just scholarly communications librarian? No, because scholarly communications librarians are just a librarian-level admins who do all the work of like an associate dean, but don't get paid to do it. And then also have to know about like copyright and publishing and shit. Yeah, and just like try and get other parts of the library to work together because are usually a department of one person and you need other people to help you. So you've got to make friends with everyone, but no one's, you're not anyone's supervisor. So it's, you're doing all this from the wrong direction. So it's always kind of a joke that, I mean, a lot of people who do Scalcom are very high speed,

I would say, and also prone to burnout. I get along very well with Skullcom librarians, I think, because they tend to be, I mean, I don't like the introverted, extroverted, like, dichotomy. I don't think that's real. but they tend to be the more extroverted ones. You have to be. Yeah, yeah. Like my, yeah, I get along with them very well because I'm like, oh, I don't scare you, cool.

I scare all the catalogers. Yeah. Sadie is laughing at me. Catalogging is where the quiet ones go. It's true. That's why I couldn't get a cataloging job. That is real, by the way. Yeah, I'm sure.

Yeah. But, I mean, I've. I've always insisted that you have to be very assertive to do this job. Well, you have to kind of, whether you're introverted or not, I mean, everything's a skill. Like, I'm an extremely introverted person. Because I think the introvert extroverted thing, I was, someone was talking about this recently, but like most people aren't even supposed to be in either of those categories. Like, most people are in the middle.

Yeah. I think I would genuinely fall in introverted. Yeah. Because I spend most of my time alone. Yeah. But you are very good at like talking with people and doing. doing that for like your job. Yeah.

And you have to, and this will come up when I do like the daily thing because it's like I had a surprisingly busy day because sometimes the weird thing about my job now is having to set my schedule to other people's times. So you have to wait for faculty to be ready. And so it's very hard to do things on your own time. Which I'm the kind of person who I would prefer to just like knock out all of my work by working like three hours really intensely and then digging around. around the rest of the day.

It's how I tend to work on anything. It's just like obsessively sit there, not move, not blink until I'm done. And then when I've run out of stuff to do, I just kind of like to grab. Which doesn't really work because you can't force anyone's hand because you're not an administrator. So even if you were administrator in the library, it wouldn't be good enough because you're not an administrator in the university. So you can't make anyone do anything. So you have to kind of wait for openings and it makes it some days are just very boring and nothing really happens. unless you have a lot of processes kind of running in the background,

which we've got a few. But that's only because I actually have a team now. If it was just me still being solo, it would be a lot more. I would just be doing presentations. I'd just be doing outreach. I lost my train of thought. Processes, background processes.

Oh, yeah. So stuff that just runs like services. So like we monitor every publication that, comes out of the university and reach out to the faculty members and ask them for the version that we can put in the repository. And that makes us very, very good at getting stuff in the repository. And it takes about, I'd say about six hours of work a week. So it's a really good investment of time to have a really successful repository program in terms of just getting numbers of deposits, percentage of open access up. But, you know, we can't force anyone to give us

the papers. And so we have to kind of always be on top of them and always asking. So that's the way we're running the program now without any kind of mandate or any kind of force because there's only the unforced force of getting to know people and reaching out to them. And then we have all kinds of other stuff with open educational resources. It's just kind of like the other half of my job. And that ends up with a lot of academic overhead and a lot of data tracking, a ton of data tracking. And that's ended up taking so much time that we're hiring another person kind of just to take over a lot of the data entry that we're having to do. What kind of data?

A lot of it is tracking student savings. So if a course gets redesigned, then we need information on the course. We need the enrollment. We need all the sections. That all takes a lot of time. If we do faculty engagement, we basically have a home-built customer relationship management database. So we built one out of scratch because we don't have access to a good one.

So we built one in Airtable, which has a new one. as I would say 800 faculty members in it. And that at a glance can tell us how much we've saved students with our redesign program, how much we've saved with buying e-books, and of course ordering those e-books. So we get the data from the bookstore. We run all the ISBN store purchasing system. We reach out to faculty, ask if they want it, put in the purchases, email the faculty, send them the link to the book, and then estimate the student savings.

So all that data has to get recorded as we're doing the process kind of manually. The other thing about this is really automated, although since the books don't really change a whole lot year to year, that was really only intense for the first few semesters we did it. And I'd already handed it off by the time it started slowing down. Other data, if we do professional development, so we'll know if they came to one of our paid professional development things. We track when they're done. If there were any requirements they didn't meet, make sure they met all the requirements, and then we send that data off to process their stipends, which goes directly into their paycheck. We track our budget, so what budget that we've gotten out of academic affairs, they give us money to run these programs. We also have money to send students to conferences, so we're tracking, and also what the library spends in terms of Spark membership and OEN membership and how that's changed over years.

So we know how much we've spent and invested and how much students have saved based on estimates. Our estimates were a lot more conservative, but the system is kind of changing how they do the things. savings estimates, so I don't like it, but it's a lot easier to do, and it also is a lot more generous. So it looks like we've saved a lot more, but I prefer doing it conservatively because I could always explain why it was that number. This one is more of a, it's like $800 a student, I don't know, whatever. And then you just multiply 800 by the enrollment, and it's just pretty lazy, and I don't like it. But it's probably the only way you can get massive amounts of people to estimate these things. I just, we were, we were being much more careful with our numbers and actually got the actual

cost of the book, subtracted the cost if there was still any cost for course materials. So sometimes just homework like systems that you can't get rid of, especially in math, because they really are dependent on that automatic grading system stuff because they don't have GA's anymore. So all that work has already kind of been automated away, like the grading work in mathematics is like already gone. So yeah, that's a huge amount of data. And we, eventually have just like we need a full-time person to take that load off and then also help us with, you know, we could comb through syllabuses and find out if people are still using OAR like a year later. That's something we can't do now. But if we had a full-timer, we could ask them to start combing through people we've redesigned and see if they've kept using it year after year. And then we could add more estimates on how much students cost savings we've done for course materials. So it's a pretty huge database. And, but I mean, it's honestly, we were juggling like three different spreadsheets,

which was when we only had probably like 200 faculty names. And now we've got four times that. And it's, we just have to keep it up. So it's a pain in the ass, but it's literally the only way to track it. I would like to do that for the other process, the outreach for open access. But the way we get those publication alerts is through email alerts. So we don't have, like, I would rather ingest it from an API directly into Airtable and then reach out an Airtable and say, okay, we got it or we didn't get it. And that would tell us how successful those outreaches are.

But Open Alex isn't quite there yet. But I've been playing around with the API for Open Alex for it to get to the level where we could replace. We basically have alerts running from Google Scholar, Scopus, which we haven't had Scopus for like years. but my email alert never expired. So I've had the email alerts going for three years, and I've just been forwarding them to my library assistant automatically. So we still have Scopus on our end, Love of Science, and NIH PubMed. So he cross-checks all of those.

He does too much manual work, but once his workload increases, I'm sure he'll learn how to say no to things more often. That sort of thing, too, is I've trained two librarians now, fresh out of library school, to do this kind of work. and they've got different personalities and different backgrounds. And I have a very specific idea of how this role should work, but now that we're a team, we can compensate for each other's weaknesses. So you don't have to do this all alone,

which is kind of the big struggling why a lot of people probably burned out, is you have to kind of be forceful all the time. Yeah. Which, yeah, that is exhausting. Yeah, it helps if you're just like kind of a little bit crazy because after I was unemployed for a while, I just decided that I was a God's gift to, librarianship and because I had to write so many cover letters saying how great I was.

And I was like, you know, what if I just believed it? What if it's true, you know? Yeah. It is it. It is true. What other main elements are there to my job? It's kind of two different sides of things. One is the open access and one is the open education.

A lot of, I mean, I've been saying for a couple years now that scholarly communications librarians will go away and that job title will kind of only exist for administrators over, like, like collections and scholarly communications. So they'll merge with like e-resources because of all these transformative agreements because now it's, okay, can we get a good transformative agreement because everyone's charging article processing charges? No one can pay those out of pocket. We have to have these transformative agreements because no one can possibly afford these

things. The big publishers still don't want to give us really good terms. Some of them do, but Elsevier doesn't. Elsever is just the worst about this. They give us like a 15% discount. It's like, woo. It's still like $4,000 or whatever. Like, who cares?

That's way more money than anyone could possibly shell out a la carte. A lot of them started off with kind of like accounts. So you would have like first come first serve and it would get you 100 papers or $15,000 or whatever. But some of the agreements have just been full waivers. So if you have a subscription, you pay a little extra and all the article processing charges are waived. And since a lot of these legacy publishers are like hybrid, they've still got like subscription access and some of them are open access. So a lot of these are hybrid journals. Those are supposed to be phased out, but who knows what's going to happen there.

Gold Open access, the article processing charge open access has been very lucrative for them. So they're going to keep going with it. But it creates all kinds of perverse incentives like increasing the amount of articles that you put out, which is what's got an MDPI and Dowie in trouble. because they've been pumping out too many special issues, which have scattered their topic focus, and that got them removed from one of the science for being off topic. Yeah, I know in my thing, instead of saying, like, what is a standard day? I gave, like, and I gave a couple of examples of, like,

my days either kind of look like this or they look like this. Like, do you have sort of a standard kind of daily walkthrough that you could give us, or are there examples of, like, here are some extremes of what? what my day-to-day work flow looks like. There aren't really extremes. Luckily, everything runs kind of smoothly at a larger institution. There aren't any big fires to put out. Stuff doesn't just break out of nowhere.

But usually what I recommended is having at least a hour or two of professional reading to stay on top of everything in the field. So a lot of it is checking your list serves, checking reports that are coming out. So, for instance, I got sent a report on open access book publishing business models by my dean. He just forward it to me. So I started marking it up to be ready to talk about possibilities for the library doing publishing. So we have a very small press books project.

We don't have any funding for it. We've been talking about it for years in terms of how to get open access book publishing happening at the library. And so I need to be ready at any moment to kind of just launch into a business plan for how we would fund open access monographs. So someone says, well, how do you fund it? What kind of, you know, knowing how the spread of income happens in these open access presses out of their universities. So for example, if you are running an open access press, you're probably going to be carried by like one or two major books. And the larger your presses, the more those major books carry you. And then that frees you up to run a lot of smaller press stuff.

So like many things, you start to see like these like Pareto distributions where a small amount of work does a huge amount of impact. So you see these all over scholarly communications where like a couple of books are carrying a press or a couple of papers per journal carry the journal. So like a couple articles get really, really high citation scores. And that makes the rest of the journal's impact factor higher. So you see all these things. And when they averaged out, they are not useful numbers. So you always have to ask, what's the median of these numbers when someone's trying to pitch you on, you know, we get this many citations or we pull in this much money on average. You have to check if those averages are actually mathematically useful because a lot of time the distribution is just split between a small amount of things highly performing.

You just see this kind of distribution all the time. So say I got pulled into a meeting with the provost or whatever, and he wants to ask about like, hey, someone mentioned bringing back the university press. I would say, okay, well, here's what's going to work and what isn't because these university presses are consolidating. Here's how much of a deficit. The large ones run. They don't make any money. No one makes money publishing academic books. If we want to make money, we have to do print runs.

Do you do print on demand? Or do you have like a thing that's going to actually run the print sales? So I just have to kind of be ready to talk about stuff like that all the time. So the one or two hours of professional reading every day keeps you on your toes so that you can focus on what is it you're going to jump into because you just have to sense an opening and go for it. Because you never know when you're going to have like 10 minutes with the provost or the president or one of the executive vice presidents. Is there a reason you do that like first thing or do you just do it anywhere in your day where? you have like an hour? It's usually because I'm just checking my mail, and that's when I start opening up

PDFs, and then I'll start going through first thing in the morning. I try not to schedule meetings too early anyways. Same. Usually not before 10. So I always keep my inbox. Like, I never have unread emails. So I always have either stuff that I've been reading or so if I put on my computer and open up Adobe, it'll have whatever I was working on marking up.

So I usually go through and highlight a PDF. so that way my eyes don't wander too far. Once in a while, I'll just print it out. Actually, I tend to do that for things. I'm just going to read once, but I want to read it quickly. So I'll print stuff out and read through it and just kind of throw it in recycling. Or I'll just throw it into the stack. So I have an OER stack and an open access stack of academic articles if I want to go back to it later.

And that can be about all kinds of stuff like feminist approaches to open access publishing. You know, people get backlash if something is more visible. So what are the feminist implications? of doing work about sex and gender or feminism, if you're going to have a bunch of people just like tearing your work apart, wouldn't be better just to keep it behind a paywall. So those sorts of equity concerns you have to worry about and be ready to talk about because someone's going to bring them up eventually. So that's, you know, there's all kinds of weird things that will come across your desk.

And since it's not really, since it's a very wide field, you know, you've got the science communication aspects, you've got the publishing aspects, the copyright aspects. You know, I might just spend a day reading a lot of copyright cases, especially if like a bunch of stuff happens. So a couple cases happened recently and I was just reading about them. So there's not a reason. It just kind of gives a little bit of structure to my day because otherwise I don't have a lot of structure to what's going to happen in a particular day. Because I don't have a lot of regular meetings except with the people I supervise and my boss, who I meet once a month. Yeah, because more or less I work independently, so I don't have to check them very often.

I did have a question I wouldn't ask, but maybe it'll be for after. But I could ask it now, and if we want to wait until after to answer it, then go ahead. In my episode, you mentioned a work journal. And I know what you mean by that, but I saw people in the Discord being like, hey, Justin, what's this work journal thing? That sounds really cool. How do you do it? What do you do?

So I wonder if through talking about what your day, like your daily workthrough looks like, how does your work journal and what does that look like play into it? Yeah, so work journal is something I started doing when I had my first librarian position. I don't remember who recommended it to me, but the idea is you kind of write down just what you've been working on throughout the day. People you talk to, projects you worked on. It really helps with memorizing names quickly when you're in a new job. In fact, there's so many people at my job.

My current job, I just had a list of people, like, just a separate file of, like, people and, like, what they looked like, so I could remember their names faster. So that's one way. Now I do it all in Obsidian, so I actually have hyperlinked people so that way I can throw, I can see every time I've met with them. I click on their name. It's going to show me every time I've written a note with them, as long as I remember to keep typing their name in. And then they also have, like, a separate markdown file just for them. So I can say, like, what their position is, who they work with, what projects I've worked with. with them on. But these are all just like my personal notes. They're not really super detailed because they don't need to be. Generally, I do it hour by hour. Some people do it at the end of the day. Some people do it weekly. Where I was working right out of grad school, we did daily reports to our director. So we would just write up what we worked on for the day, like a paragraph,

and send that in. I would just send my work journal. So I would cut out my personal notes. And it would just say like eight worked on this, nine worked on this, 12, worked on this. And if it was something that the director didn't really care about, I would just start cutting it out before I emailed it. So I'd copy it over to an email, cut out that part, and just send it. Because I was keeping the work journal anyway. This was also pretty useful during COVID because they didn't know what to do with remote work. And so I just had my team start keeping work journals.

And then eventually they actually mandated these kind of insane PDF. They were built in PDFs. And like Excel sheets that you had to write in your tasks for the day. And if you were hourly, you had to do it like by 30 minute intervals or something crazy. That's just a waste of time, you know? It was a huge waste of time. And no one read them. No one read them.

And I was like, the moment we went remote, I was like, here's what we're doing. Here's how we're doing it. We're going to have these meetings once a week. You're going to keep a work journal. You're going to send it to me at the end of the week. Here's how detailed it has to be. And I was like, everyone could have done this. But just no one has any idea how to remotely manage a team.

If they can't just like walk over and kind of lean over the cubicle. like office space style and just be like, hey, what's going on? I need to, people are just like that. Universities are much more conservative in their, in their organizational structures. But one good thing of the pandemic is people learned how to fucking use Zoom, which was a menace because no one would. Now I can just be like, yeah, I don't, I don't need to go to the other campus or whatever. Like, we're just doing this over Zoom or over the phone.

People are just more comfortable working at their computers. I had so many face-to-face beatings before that. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of, I mean, there's nothing. there's no secret to the work journal. Like you can make it as complex as you want, but it's really just to, especially like now, I don't keep it as strict as I used to

because I know what I'm doing. It was kind of really, it's much more useful earlier in your career, I think, or when you're starting a new job. Yeah. Because it helps you know who you're working with and what you're working on

and keep track of everything. Whereas I don't really need to do that because, you know, I have a department calendar now that I share with my team. I have my own outlook calendar. kind of when I meet with my supervisor, I'll just kind of scroll through my calendar meetings and be like, because I also put just personal blocks of 30 minute time, like send out those emails on this thing,

work on this presentation. So I can just go through my outlook and be like, oh, yeah, that's what I worked on last week. That's usually what I'll do in a meeting with him is I'll do that just right beforehand, put it into my notes for the meeting. And then while I'm there, you know, if we're meeting over Zoom, which we usually do, I'll just go through the Outlook calendar, see what's in there. My Outlook calendar has kind of replaced my work journals a little bit, too, but I still have it. It's also useful because if I find something when I'm off work and I try very hard not to work

outside of work hours unless just shifting time, I'm like, okay, I'm going to read this like during, you know, when I start work tomorrow. It's very useful to, you know, if someone shares something on Twitter or whatever, I can just copy the link, throw it into Obsidian's Daily Note and then just go grab it the next day. Yeah, that was something I kind of used to do, and I need to get back in the habit of having a like shut down or closing ritual at the end of my day. And part of that was setting myself up for what I would be doing the next day. So like if I needed to be working on something that was like in the browser, closing my computer, like leaving work for the day, but having that tab open on that browser on that computer so that when I got to my computer,

oh, it's right there ready for me. It's amazing how much that helps, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that I do that with PDFs. There are a lot of times, too, where if it's like a website, I will just print it to PDF so that it can sit in my Adobe for me to come back to later rather than having like a million tabs open.

Right. Because I'll just ignore them. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You get like tab blindness, you know? Yeah. I generally tend not to keep a bunch of tabs open. Yeah.

Like, I know I left some tabs open on my browser. work browser today because it's like I needed to respond to like a two hour reference interaction that I had and I needed to follow up on it but I didn't have time because I had like a meeting right after and then I had to leave. So I just left the tabs open from the consultation like from the interaction in my browser and I was like that way I'll do it first thing and I'll remember what I was going to do just because I just left the remnants of the reference interaction on my browser. Yeah. I still have. have like we also have like reference tracking that's kind of done centrally and I also have to figure

out ways to remind myself to go in and submit those reference interactions to lib guides so or live wizard and so I'll either I have those in my obsidian daily note those links are always there at the top of my daily note to help remind me and then sometimes I'll just if it's an email reference I'll just throw it into a folder that says like references to be added so that way I'll remember to go through and that I haven't done those yet. And I usually either move them out of the folder or delete them or something. Some things that came up today, since I have the institutional repository, we consolidated a lot of our digital collections.

So we used to have content DM and we had a hosted Omeca. And now we have a self-hosted Omeca through our IT department, which is a huge pain in the ass and B Press. So we are working on having some digital collections migrate into B-Press. and there were some issues because these were very large tiffs that were turned into PDFs. And Adobe was just crashing, trying to load these giant scanned maps as PDFs. But we couldn't put them in as tiffs or we could, but people wouldn't use them. So we were trying to figure out exactly what the issues were.

So there was like a digital collections aspect that just popped up in my day of trying to make a decision on what to do with these files. So we decided to compress them so that people could view them easily and then put as a second file, the full size, either the full size tip or the full size PDF. I can't remember what we decided on. But putting those as supplementary files so that people can actually see it at a glance, and then if they have to go in and get the more detailed version, because a lot of our traffic comes through Google Scholar, so you want people to go directly to the PDF. But if they're going to download a PDF that doesn't really work, then that's going to be a problem. So we had to decide what's going to be most useful within the limitations of B Press. So just figuring out how to get

the stupid software to work in a way that makes sense. sense because it's just not as simple as putting a file in or retrieving it. It's how are people going to interact with it? How are people going to use it and download it and things like that? I got a email out of nowhere from one of our departments asking, or they said, we heard you had interest in doing a presentation on predatory publishing. And, you know, this faculty member mentioned it. I haven't emailed that person over a year, so I don't know what's going on there, but probably they talked to someone who said, Justin will do it. And so I was like, absolutely, I'll do a thing on predatory publishing.

By the way, I've been wanting to get on the agenda of, you know, your collections meetings or your collections meetings, your department meetings so that I can say everything about the new projects that are coming up or that we've been working on the new services that we've been building in Scarlett Communications. Can I get onto your agenda or do you want to do this combined? So we set up a date for me to do the presentation. I had to update this shared Excel document that has every department in the university on it and who on my team is going to reach out to them. I've been doing most of it so far. Who the faculty member contact is if we've scheduled a date. And so far I've been reaching out because we haven't done this in a few years. So I've been reaching out to get onto these department meetings or school meetings or college meetings and just get a one-to-one chance to talk to the faculty members directly.

So I had to jump on that opportunity because I had to. remember that that was something I've been waiting to talk to. Then I wrote up a new description for the talk and I sent it to the department and, you know, if I get good turnout, that'll be good. If I don't, then I'll press the issue again after I do the presentation because I'll remember if I haven't done it yet. So that was one spreadsheet updated so far. And then our OER redesign grant, the ballots had been tallied. So I worked with our open education librarian. We split up the faculty that we're going to help redesign courses. So we split them down the middle, depending on if we've already worked with them, if we're working with them on

something else. And also people who have dropped out in the past, if we're going to move them into this cohort, and then setting up those meetings with the cohort, which luckily I have a, I use boomerang with Outlook. So it'll just embed a little clickable schedule and they can just click it. And it'll send a Zoom meeting for both of us, and it'll automatically accept it. So I can send that BCC to all five people, and then they can just click on those times, and it'll set up the meeting for us. So that saves me a little bit of time having to do this one-on-one. And then I went into the CRM database to update that I'd reached out to them so that when I actually have the meetings, I'll start marking off, okay, I've met with them, I've met with them. They've dropped out. You know, it helps us keep

track of what process they're in or what part of the process they're in and when they're done so that we'll have them mark to pay out the stipend the end of the semester. That was most of, that kind of, I think, covers the whole lot of things. There wasn't really anything related to like journals, except the predatory publishing thing. It's going to be about journals. But there wasn't anything in particular about, oh, I did get a weird email about our relationship with the bookstore and getting some more data. that we have to get for compliance issues. So if you have an OER course in Texas,

you're supposed to market in the course catalog as an OER course, and the way we've complied with that is having zero materials costs and low materials cost designations so that students can search by those. So we were gathering that information by a separate form that our IT set up, and we just had a meeting with IT to fix some bugs in the form. And then our, I guess there's somewhere, new at Fallat Bookstore, and he's got it in his mind that this form is stopping them from getting good textbook adoption rates, because it's too confusing to have two places that you have

to fill out two forms, and that's too much. So they've cut us out of the all-faculty email that goes out, so we're not going to be in that email anymore that we've been working with them and helping them, helping craft the language on to get that course marking data that we need, because the bookstore data isn't accurate enough for us to be able to mark the courses. So they're going to try and do it that way. And I've got another meeting where we're going to figure out, okay, what are we going to do? So I just forwarded it to my boss. And I said, you know, we've got to talk at the provost about this.

We knew this was coming, more or less, that the bookstore was, they had already sent out an email saying that this was like our fault that their compliance rates were low, which is true. It's just no one cares. And so we already knew that we were going to have to have this meeting eventually. So it was just kind of surprising to get the kind of final you're cut out of this communication line, especially because the library can't send all faculty emails. So we always have to go to an external department to send an email to all faculty members. Which is a huge pain in the ass. Yeah. What the hell?

Yeah. Don't you hate when your job is emails? I hate when my job is emails. I really hate when my job is emails. Yeah, but we find out whenever someone in the president's office retires or whatever, that goes to. to all faculty and staff, but nothing useful. Like someone I've never met and it's like, cool, I don't care. It's not worth sending me an email about.

I mean, good for their office, but, you know, if we can't send those kinds of emails, it's a problem. I mean, actually, it used to be that everyone could send all faculty, all emails, but that led to a little too much organizing. And so that's why companies don't let you do that anymore. So if you ever wondered why it's so hard to send an email to everyone in your organization, that's usually why. But I'm pretty sure at my last job, I could send it all faculty email without any special permissions.

Yeah, I can send to basically all of the all lists, except for all name of my conservatory, because we're so small, right? So it's like there is just, there's just send it to literally everyone in the whole organization ever. I can't send to that one, but I can do all faculty, all staff, all students, all conservatory students, all music ed students, all online students, etc. I can do that, but I can't go send this to everyone in one big thing. I just have to do it, add those. You just have to add four. Whereas I would have to add a thousand just to get the faculty members. Which is bad. Yeah. I mean, we don't even have like an all-library email list. We do have a list serve for people who are, who wanted to sign up for like an open education list serve. But it's

honestly easier to just copy from a list of faculty. faculty members that we're going to target for something. So say 40 or 50 people and just copy those emails out of our database and put them into an Outlook email and just send it that way. And sometimes that's how we have to do it. But yeah, cross-campus communication is really tough. It's not just us. So it's that problem.

We cover everything. Yeah, because I was going to ask, like, what professional development do you do? But that, like, reading you do is a lot of it. And then I assume you do conferences and stuff every once in a while. Yeah. Also, I want to make sure. has the chance to ask questions if they want to. Conferences not as huge.

It used to be a lot of like free webinars have been, there was, they were kind of getting better and better up until 2020. And then I think they kind of started to decline in quality in terms of professional development webinars that were just kind of offered for free because, I don't know, people were just doing them or they just clogged up everyone's email

because they're like, oh, if we're doing it on Zoom, let's just invite everybody. And people weren't really running them very well. And so I've kind of fallen off doing free webinars. But conferences, you know, we have kind of, since a lot of them have moved online, they're a lot cheaper. And so we can do more in a year rather than just like one big one since I haven't traveled at all. We haven't spent any, we haven't really spent any money. So we can just register for like the Open Education Conference that's coming up or the U.S. ETD's electronic Dces and dissertations conference.

I think I'm registered for that. know. I'm like a, I'm like a representative from my region. So I think I'm registered, but I don't know. I haven't really done anything with them. Spark sends a lot of good information. We're Spark members, so we get the member updates. And we also get, like, calls on, like, the financial disclosures that the companies do. So if, like, there's a financial disclosure about, you know, the quarterly reports or something, then Spark will have, what's his name, Claudio Asepi, do a presentation where he will run over it. If they've got any report out, they'll do webinars on that.

There's also committee meetings, like working groups and stuff that I'm active, I'm semi-active in. Usually just go and lurk, but there's lots of good information because there's lots of people like Scarlett Gavin who we've had on, Dorothy O'Sallow. Shouts out. They're both running working groups and spark around privacy and contracts. So I can learn a lot from them, but a lot of it I can't really put into practice because, again, you're not an administrator.

So, you know, I have written a whole privacy policy for our library that's gone nowhere. It just kind of is sat. And I can't really, I'm not really in on the contract negotiations. And even when I did sneak into the negotiations with Elsevier, I've kind of slowly been blocked back out. So we have to organize kind of in different informal ways. So there's a group of open education librarians throughout our system. and then I run a meeting for scholarly communications and research data people that meets bi-monthly. And we've just kind of taken that upon ourselves to run those meetings because no one else does.

And it actually gives us information into what deals people are getting, what contracts are able to sign. Just data that doesn't get shared very often. It's just easier to set up these regular meetings and get that information. Any other professional development? I don't think so. I mean, probably. But I've had a few people who have been good mentors or at least colleagues who are more experienced. the main and have been there to answer questions. So,

Twitter was pretty good for that. A lot of Skullcom people were very active on Twitter. A lot of them are not now. So they've migrated to Blue Sky or the Skullcom shit-talking Discord. That's probably where all of them are, really, is the big Discord. Is it actually called the Skullcom shit-talking Discord? Because that would be amazing. No, it's called Evil Empire. And it's the El Sederer loco. And I don't look at it at all. But I'm there. But I don't. that I don't do anything. Except everyone's on Justin will tag me and like, hey, what was that A.O3 trope thing that I keep referencing, but forget exactly what it is.

And then I have to say, hurt no comfort. And you're like, yeah. And then I go away, like a thief in the night. Yeah, I was making a point about something. I don't remember what. Yeah. There are a lot of non-library and non-Scalgon people in there, too. But everyone in there's pretty cool.

Yeah. So far probably hasn't been infiltrated by Reluxe people. but could happen. Yeah. I know the music librarian, who is my, like, mentor, who has also been a Skullcom librarian and is very, very knowledgeable about copyright,

in general, but also like music copyright. She's getting really active on Blue Sky now. Like, she's made that migration and is talking more there as well. Yeah. The one I sent the tweet in our group chat. I think it was today with her opinions. Yeah, that's her. I didn't know.

Yeah. She's the reason I'm a librarian. Yay. That is true. I think I was following her, but I don't remember why. I don't know her. But yeah, there's like a relatively tight-knit group of people who do SkullCom and who are like the most poster brain of us. And they've been very helpful in learning the ropes and what we do differently.

And then honestly, one thing I've also done is like, search every university, like every large university in Texas for Skull Compositions and just put that into a big spreadsheet. So that way, I just have contact info for people who are in Texas doing the same thing as me. Yeah. For like the library school students, yeah, the library school students listening who might be interested in such a career, like what would you maybe recommend for them or say to them or advice or anything like that? I don't know how good Skullcom education is in library school, if you'll even get an opportunity to do a class on it. Just like learn, take a copyright class at least.

Yeah, or like just a couple webinars. I mean, you really only need to know the basics to get started. Copyright doesn't come up as much as you might think, but it's useful to know the licenses, Creative Commons, how they work, how reuse works, get a good solid grasp of like how copyright works practically rather than like edge cases. But and the rest you'll pick up over time in list serves. There's a big scullcom list serve by ACRL. You can start following that in grad school.

I was definitely following a lot of list serves in grad school. And that was where I started. That's a good idea. Yeah, same. Get on the list serves. Some even like, we'll have like some like ALA organizations and round tables will even let students join as members and get involved at like relatively low work.

So like do that. It's good. Yeah, and you'll meet a lot of people. Yeah. I was lucky enough that, you know, people were still active on Tumblr in the library world, so I've met a lot of people through that, and then migrated Twitter. So now I would say get on Blue Sky, if you want to have like a social media experience, that's probably where you're going to find a lot of interesting people in digital humanities and SCALCOM and copyright lawyers migrating.

In our Discord people share Blue Sky codes all the time as they get them. Yeah. I have like four, so yeah, if anybody needs one, just drop me a line. Yeah. But I don't know, it's hard to plan for a Skullcom career because it really depends on what's open. And like I said, I think these jobs are going to go away as to become more specialized into. I also keep job alerts. That's something you should do in grad school, too, is start Google job alerts and watch how the job titles change, the duties change.

the duties change. I've never turned any of them off. I've had them money for years. Yeah, that helped me decide what courses to take in grad school because I would look at job ads and be like, ah, that's a skill I don't have. I should take the class that lets me learn about that skill. Yeah, or as to do it at work.

You know, just like, I think I cataloged like five things just to say I'd done cataloging. Right, yeah. So I asked our cataloger, like, let me catalog some stuff. You know, there's a lot of things that you can start looking at and start crafting your resume to look like those job ads. And I've never really turned them off. So I can see how the jobs change, the requirements change over time.

They're definitely starting to look for more senior positions that didn't really exist all that long ago. So they're now looking for people with like five years, 10 years experience, and specifically in SCOCOM. Those kind of jobs didn't really exist a long time ago, or at least I never saw them. Yeah. I'll say that. management librarians are coming up, open education librarians.

Yeah, I remember at my previous job that the Skullcom person was also the head of the department that included the digital library and the institutional repository. And so like by default, the Skullcom person, like she wasn't the person who did the institutional repository, but like she oversaw that, right? And like she had a lot to do with our digital collections as well. So it's like, I don't know how often you see, like, the digital library and the Skullcom worlds intersect in jobs. But I know that was true at the last place I was at. Some places keep them separate just because the platforms are separate.

But really consolidation makes a lot of sense. I did a job interview recently where I recommended that they need to do some consolidation because their digital collections, their Chris system. So it's the research information system. which tracks kind of all the grants and the publications of a university and their institutional repository were all separate systems and they could consolidate there. And sometimes people have multiple, like an exhibit system might be separate software. So Omeca might be separate. So you might have all these different platforms that need to be consolidated. And you might end up working with special collections to do that.

Because I originally wanted to go into special collections, but it's very, very, very competitive. Jobs just don't open up. It's not even so much competitive. It's just really jobs never open up. Yeah, people don't leave those positions. Or they don't get refilled. Yeah. Or it's all like project grant-based stuff.

Right. A lot of people will jump two-year gig to three-year gig to two-year gig, and that's also very tough. So I would say Skullcom is easier to aspire to get into, and it definitely doesn't hurt to know all the stuff that it covers, because, but really the main thing is to know how to do instruction and know how to do outreach, because nine times out of ten, that's going to be part of your job. Yeah.

To me, it feels like a role that's good for like Jack's, Jack of all trades kind of people who like have a sort of like a skill set where it's like they have like a bunch of different things in their pocket that they can do because it sounds like that you do a lot of that and SkullCon. You have to be kind of like knowledgeable about this and that and this and that and this and that. Yeah. I mean, this isn't really good career advice, but I mean, something that was said to me was if you're, it's really useful for your first job to be at a small life. because you get to do a bit of everything. And that was definitely helpful for me because I did get to do a bit of everything. But a lot of the more stable jobs at big universities want specialized experience. So it depends on like how good the state of the job, you know, the job openings are and the job descriptions.

And just how good you are at working your own resume into looking like you're more specialized than you are. Yeah, doing a residency that gave me experience in everything hurt me weirdly, even though I thought it was. would be good to have a jack of all tradesy kind of experience. It was all like, no, have you lived and brewed cataloging and can recite mark off the, you know, with your eyes closed and, you know, whatever. It was like having sort of a broad skill set hurt me in cataloging specifically. But catalogers kind of suck sometimes. Cataloging and special collections both usually want very specialized experience.

But everyone else is going to want, but those jobs don't open up that often. And everyone else is going to want to know, can you teach a class, can you teach a webinar, can you send an email, can you do outreach, can you work the desk? Yeah. And then maybe do circulation on the side if it's a small library. And that'll get you jobs and access services and all kinds of front-facing positions. That's just where more jobs generally are. Like we have a big tech services department, but that's pretty non-standard. Also, we just don't have a whole lot of librarians.

So I think if we hired a lot more librarians, we would become. less tech services heavy. Yeah. University of Utah's got a huge, like, tech services thing. Like, the whole, like, fourth floor of that library is just where, like, the catalogers and special collections and digital collections is. And they've got, like, glass, like, walls. So they get sunlight. They're not in a basement, right?

And, like, I know we make that joke of, like, oh, you put catalogers in the basement. But, like, it's bad for you. So. Yeah. Yeah. Treat your catalogers like you treat your plants. Water them regularly and make sure they get the right amount of sunlight. They're like succulents, you know?

There you go. There you go. Catalogers are like succulents. What kind of plant are scolicalm laborians? I know, probably one of those like ferns that just kind of sits there. It doesn't does its own thing. Or like a spider plant or something. Spider plants are prolific.

I like the ferns because then you poke them and they do the thing. this is not a visual medium but the burns go like and they like retreat if you poke them everyone post a comment what kind of plant are you what kind of plant is your job what's your plant job oh that sounded dirty

oh yep that's me I don't think that's me all right I think I got everything yeah I like that idea about like spending an hour getting caught up on like list serves and professional reading and everything. That's a really good idea.

I like that. You really have to. And I also recommend it for people I'm training. In fact, when I'm onboarding someone, I'll just meet with them every morning. And because I usually assign them a lot of things to read because you don't learn this in library school. So then I have to like, you know, what did you read yesterday? Got any questions? Okay.

Go ahead and work on whatever. So I just meet every morning for like a couple weeks. And you can get a lot done in that amount of time, especially if you cross-stream people. Yeah. I should do that with my graduate fellows. They don't like want to be librarians, but their graduate fellowship is technically a scholarship, so it's not like a student job. So maybe I should give them things to read. Yeah, I just usually give them that and then I'll bring them in.

So if I'm onboarding a new student, I'll do that for like a week or two. But then for a librarian, it takes a few months to really train them because there's just so much to catch up on. And then kind of instilling the habit and them of keeping up with all this stuff because there's just a big wide world of it. And you have to be constantly keeping up with what other people are doing. So that way, you know, if you're not getting enough support as well. It's managing your workload is kind of really essential to this, too. And it gets more difficult once you have a team of people. But I kind of encourage everyone to still work independently and manage around workloads and know when they need to say no.

But you've still got to look out just as a supervisor. Librarians tend to say yes to too much stuff. And that can get you in trouble because if you over commit, then you have to, take away a service. And that's way worse than never offering the service in the first place. Much bigger pain in the ass, though, just know when to say no. Keep a list of things that you said no to. That's also good advice I got. Until you have more support, this is on the no list. And I would keep a no list and on my wall. And these are the things I've said no to. That's a good idea. It works. I've built a whole department. I was like, give me more people. But yeah, I mean,

there's lots of good advice out there. You just have to just write it down and memorize it once when someone gives you a little tip like that. It's really just really useful. You never know. Also, you never know what's going to come in handy. So any kind of interest you have, just sort of pursue it. You never know when it's going to be relevant. I'm sure something at my work eventually is going to involve Batai.

And it'll be like a good thing that I've been reading his biography. I finally listened to the Acid Horizon episodes. Was it Stuart Hall? About like Batai and like the climate? Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's Stuart Hall. It's a different guy. Stuart somebody.

Yeah. Yeah. Sue or somebody. Yeah. Okay. I'll say to go feed their dog. Good night.