University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Undergraduate Research Fair

Showing Up Is Half The Battle

In a recent lunch conversation one of my fellow new professors (not a librarian) remarked that they were surprised how rarely they see other new faculty at important university events.  There are about four or five of us out of about 30-40 new faculty who bump into each other quite a bit (1-2 times per month) and we almost never encounter the other new faculty members.

To us this is both perplexing and worrying.  As new tenure track faculty members there is a lot of pressure, people need to setup and start research, publish a certain minimum amount of times, prepare new teaching materials, serve on committees, present and attend conferences, and try and maintain some sort of work-life balance.  It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, and we often do.  In spite of the crazy whirlwind of being first year tenure track faculty my colleague and I have made the time to attend several campus events.

Why you should be involved on campus:

People from every major college on campus will review your folders when you go up for tenure.
Do you really want their only impression of you to be from those folders?

Someday you will stick your foot in your mouth. You will do so badly, likely at the worst possible moment.

If people know you and your work they are more likely to look at it as an anomaly and not a regular occurrence.

University officials, especially at large universities, keep track of who attends their events.

Do you really want to be that professor no one ever sees at anything?  A lot of the events I meet my colleagues at are sponsored by the Senior Vice Chancellor of the Office of Research, the Chancellor of the University, or the Senior Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs. Now I don’t know about you, by my colleague and I feel that it’s a very good thing to have these people see our faces on a semi-regular basis in a positive manner at events which they think are important.

Collaborators, Co-teachers, and Friends

Eventually you will want or need on-campus collaborators for work, you’ll probably also want people to hang out with after work the odd Friday, or people to hang out with over pizza and some movies.  It will be very difficult to identify who you should collaborate with, or who you want to be friends with if you never get out and meet your colleagues.

Your tenure track position should be a career not a job.

Not being involved in the campus community makes you seem more like an office worker than a tenure track faculty.  Being a faculty member is not just about academics, publications, and presentations, it’s about service and the sense of community within your college or university.

I’m not advocating going to every event you’re invited to, that would be impossible.  Every campus has a variety of activities and professional development workshops available.  In general my problem is not finding something to go to, but deciding which events are the highest priority to go to.  You should be able to make at least 2-3 campus events per month with very little strain on your schedule, if you can’t take 3-4 hours a month to be part of the campus community you should ask yourself if what you’re doing is really that important, that vital.  If the answer is yes you might want to talk with your chair about restructuring your time or possibly lightening your duties, and re-examining your priorities.

My day started by coming in a little early in an attempt to clear my inbox for the week.  I discovered that interim SVCAA Weissinger has been selected as a candidate for the permanent position, she gets my vote! (SVCAA stands for Senior Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs.) Some of you may be wondering why a librarian would care about the SVCAA position, but the library no matter how valuable cannot be effective and efficient without good leadership both in the library and within the university community.  Leadership in higher-ed can make or break an institution and any programs which they are associated with, so I am glad to see someone I consider smart, capable, and a good communicator being consider for the SVCAA position.

After somewhat clearing my inbox I decided to work on Collection Development.  Our Dean of Libraries has asked that we try and spend out 90% of our funds by the end of February so it’s time to find some good titles that I think might get used.  These funds can only be used for books and other items that we can purchase for one-time as a monograph, if I could use the funds on journal titles there wouldn’t be any left to worry about spending.  I don’t want to spend $$$ just to spend so I try and buy reference works, study-aids, a very small amount of popular science books with really good science and accessible writing, science communication, and books to help with the research and publication process.  I decided to ask the cloud for suggestions in the areas of forensics (a new program at UNL) and biology before starting my reference desk shift.

At the reference desk it was a nice day with just enough students to keep my and my desk partner busy, but not so many that we were overwhelmed.  Most of the questions had to do with the new Pharos software.  Pharos is a program that lets you assign different logons to different types of patrons allowing you to set different time limits for different patron types.  The main confusion for our users was that previously they had a different login based on their active directory accounts, with the new Pharos software everyone needs to login with their UNL ID number or library card ID number if people are not UNL students/faculty/staff.  In connection with this I sent in a report about a computer that kept shutting itself down, boo!

I decided to clear out some of my old working files from my computer and came across a list of links, dumped them with a brief explanation and a picture on my website to create Tips From the Experts: Interviewees & New Workers. This post was later picked up by @ALA_Joblist, much to my surprise.  It just goes to show you never know what will resonate with people

I am asked if I can find and purchase some books on gender/sex and the brain that are science based, i.e. that are related to biological sciences, specifically neurology.  This is a very cutting edge field and I know there are several people who do neurological research at UNL, and it also fits nicely with the gender studies people so I’m happy to take a look at what’s there.  Again I decide to crowd source recommendation and ask the people from #scio11 and some biology and neurology friends for their recommendations.  I also promise to compile the list of recommendations for people the next week (I will post on this next).

I run out of time for lunch and go to my twice monthly meeting with my supervisor at 2pm, oops? (Sorry for being a bad work/life role model!  Sometimes the focus which people value can hinder things like eating because you loose track of time…)  Our meeting went well, there are changes coming to the library (no surprise there), but I think things are changing in a positive direction and it’s nice to know she’s looking out for my workload!  I’m fortunate in that I am just enough like my supervisor that we get along, but different enough that we don’t usually clash.  She is also one of those rare people that really means it when they say, “ask me anything” so when I’m not sure if a question might offend someone I can go to her and say “I don’t want to offend anyone, but I am not sure/confused, etc.” and get a real answer and some guidance on how to handle things.  Sometimes when I bring up these issues I find out they aren’t my problem and she handles the issue or passes them discretely on to the person best capable of dealing with a situation. It’s good to have discretion and ask for advice so that you can handle things appropriately. I don’t really have as many people skills as others assume I do, but when I realize I don’t know the appropriate or discreet way to handle something I find someone who I know is discreet and ask them who to approach/how to say/handle the situation.  I still put my foot in my mouth just like everyone else, but this helps cut down on that alot.

Finally I  go and find something to eat and take my lunch hour to run some quick errands around town near the university. Bless the parking garage, it’s totally worth the $5 per month extra to never have to fight for a space or park outside in the inclement weather.  I was going to work on devising questions for the Architecture Library Assessment but get burried under e-mail, catching up on science and library posts to keep current, and doing a little tidying up before the 7:30pm talk by Dr. Lise Eliot titled “Brain Sex: Truth, Tall Tales and Time for a Developmental Perspective”, held two buildings over at UNL’s Gaughan Center. Please see the link for the press release: http://newsroom.unl.edu/announce/todayatunl/162/1417

Dr. Eliot’s excellent presentation can be summed up in a few points:

1. We need to be clear about what are real differences and percieved differences between boys and girls.
2. There is a lot of misinformation being portrayed as fact in the news, schools, and even in science.
3. Show me the data!
4. “What you do with your brain effects your brain.”

To expand a little on point 3:
We need to engage our brains and not blindly accept any study which passes peer-review (or is not even submitted to it) as gospel.  We need to look at the sample sizes and ask to see the data.  When generalizing about differences between males and females you really should have a large sample size, results with 50-100 participants are not conclusive at all, although they may be useful aggregated together with similar studies to create a large and useful data sets. There are billions of people in this world, someone with a chart handy, look up how many participants you would need for an acceptable error range?  I don’t know off the top of my head but it’s a lot bigger than 100 people!  Watch out for studies where the researcher is an object acting on a group of participants, or where the researcher knows things they aren’t supposed to according to their protocols.

After a quick word with some of the gender studies faculty and Dr. Eliot I made my way home at 9:15pm.  And that is my #libday6.

What is professional?

Here are a few items to contemplate, with color commentary.  These posts examine: how we dress, leadership styles, how we promote ourselves, and professionalism.

Dress for Other Reasons by R. Lee Hadden

While I agree with the commenter who said that it depends on the office culture, I do think that how you present yourself changes how people view you professionally.  I’m highlighting this article not because I agree with all of the assumptions made about appropriate dress, but because it demonstrates how some people view what we wear professionally.  Take any advice on how to present yourself with a grain of salt, and remember that if you want to stand out and be viewed as professional, strive for a put-together look.  When in doubt dress up not down, it’s easy to take off a jacket and roll up your sleeves, but hard to change a t-shirt into a blouse or dress shirt.  Remember you can add a bit of personality to any style with a bit of embellishment, professional does not mean boring.

A Plague On Both Your Hepburns?: Leaders, Change Agents, and Library Archetypes by Leigh Anne Vrabel

Disclaimer: This post was written about the archetypes of Audrey and Katherine Hepburn, not the people, the archetypes, and is a “philosophical ramble, and not a scholarly study”.

In the context of this post, I think many leaders are not pure Audrey or pure Katherine, but a blending of the styles presented in the article.  I myself have always admired both archetypes and strive to meld Audrey’s grace and compassion, with Katherine’s forthrightness (Like Katherine, I don’t like being pigeon holed).  I doubt many reading the above post will fit neatly into one category or the other, but I think it’s helpful to reflect on who we are so that we can determine what, if anything, we’d like to change about how we do act, both as individuals and as librarians.

Don’t let it go to your head by Laurel Tarulli

I have always enjoyed reading Laurel’s blog, she is level headed, interesting, and always worth reading.  This post generated quite a bit of debate in the comments section on the difference between confidence and arrogance. It is important to note that neither I, nor Laurel, disagrees with self-promotion, her post and the discussion it generated can be viewed as being a debate about how you promote yourself.   One of my favorite quotes from Laurel in the comments is:

“At the end of the day, you need to deal with the consequences of your actions. What feels right to you? I am more inclined to gravitate toward strong-willed, confident individuals that still believe that integrity and a dose of humility are stronger characteristics of a professional and a leader than that of self-serving, calculating individuals.”

What is professionalism? by Laurel Tarulli

This is a follow-up to the previous post, Don’t let it go to your head.  This post presents a review of the Professionalism Initiative: The University of Kansas School of Medicine, and provides links to a few other readings on the subject of professionalism.  I encourage anyone interested in the professionalism to read this post.

In the end we all must make our own decisions as to what we consider to be professional, the people we choose to emulate, and how we treat others.  It is easy to feel superior when things have been going our way, to brush others aside, but it is a mistake to do so.  The best leaders I have seen lead by example, they care for the people whom they lead, the work that they do, and they ask about you instead of talking about themselves.  Next time someone asks about you consider giving a brief answer, and then asking about him or her.  It is harder to listen than to talk, but it is something that is worth practicing.