librarypunk 143

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Justin:
[0:00] Yeah, I was listening to a podcast just now, and they were talking about Spotify-wrapped. And apparently, Sainsbury's in the UK did one year, they did grocery shopping-wrapped. They would send people what you spent your money on.

Rachel:
[0:16] People don't want to know that they know that about you.

Justin:
[0:20] I was trying to think of what would be the worst thing, because it would be like, you were in the top 1% of toilet paper buyers, but would it be worse? To find out that you were in like the bottom 1% and when you get worried, you're like, what's wrong with me?

Rachel:
[0:36] I know I'm trying to do, you know, my info set good when I scan my grocery card and it's like, welcome, unknown user. I'm like, yes, that's correct. You know what I buy, but you don't know who I am, hopefully.

Sadie:
[0:51] Dutch Brothers, the drive-thru coffee chain, it did like a Dutch Bros wrapped and it was like, if you are what you drink, you're iced coffee. And I was like, I knew that. And then it was like, you went through our drive-thru 42 times last year. And I was like, oh no.

Justin:
[1:09] But I've been doing job interviews and I worry that I'm coming off too casual in them because I've done so many at this point that I'm just kind of like, hey, what's going on? I'm cracking jokes. I'm having fun. I've already looked up everyone's CVs. I already know everyone's name and stuff. And now I'm like, I don't know. I think so many librarians are already so introverted. I might be putting them off by being too chatty.

Jay:
[1:34] And remember my my tales of how it took me forever to get jobs because I was not the type of personality catalogers respond to.

Rachel:
[1:43] Yeah.

Jay:
[1:44] This is why my first cataloging job happened seven years after getting into grad school when my manager is as much of a yapper as I am.

Justin:
[1:53] Actually, I was that just made me think, are there like a disproportionate amount of gay men in cataloging? because yes i think i think uh university of miami was.

Rachel:
[2:03] Like there's.

Jay:
[2:05] More than one of us there's like me there's kr roberto and that's just among the like queer cataloging like.

Rachel:
[2:13] Folks yeah maybe it's a tech services thing too because yeah as much as like libraries in general are more welcoming than other spaces to like neurodivergence like the tech side is even more extreme that way let.

Jay:
[2:30] Me tell you a bunch of introverted shut-ins don't like me.

Rachel:
[2:33] Yeah well also in libraries like you've got like i think people like me who are like introverts who are just like fascinated with people so like that's what kind of introverts the reference librarians are they're like introverts who love talking to people, but they're still introverts.

Sadie:
[2:51] I love knowing everybody's business. I don't want anybody to know mine. That's the kind of introvert that I am.

Rachel:
[2:58] I was a big, I'm from the Midwest and I worked there for a while and it was the biggest cultural change coming to the South was like, I had, I had staff that reported to me and I had to like put on my agenda, like ask them about their weekend because in the Midwest, everyone is like, that's your business. We don't, you know, no worries.

Jay:
[3:19] I'm from the part of the Midwest that's the South. And so when I went to grad school in central Illinois and so.

Rachel:
[3:25] Yeah, yeah.

Jay:
[3:26] That was a culture shock. Cause I was in school.

Rachel:
[3:29] Whether Southern Illinois is the South and it 100% is. Yeah.

Jay:
[3:33] No, me and my dad are brash rednecks. I was, I fit right in in Virginia where I went to school. and then I went off to grad school at Champaign-Urbana and it was like night and day.

Rachel:
[3:45] Oh yeah, Midwesterners will just talk to you for hours and hours and hours and you'll learn nothing about them. It's a real skill.

Jay:
[3:53] Yeah, whereas now I'm in New England in Boston where everyone loves telling you their opinion and they're like, they're not rude, but they're to the point.

Justin:
[4:02] They're direct.

Jay:
[4:02] And that's their way, they're direct. That's the word, they're direct and that's how they're nice. And I'm like, oh, I feel.

Rachel:
[4:08] It's a very, very different way of being nice.

Jay:
[4:13] You're a little bit of an asshole, but you're nice.

Justin:
[4:15] You're doing it to save the other person's time. And that's the nice thing because you're in a city. Whereas the more rural it gets, the more time you spend talking to the point where if you're out west and you just see another car coming down an empty road, you'll just stop and talk to each other out of the windows of your car. Or like a police officer pulls you over because he's lonely, you know. I had a coworker who was from Boston and she came down to Texas and she's like, I think people think I'm a bitch. I'm like, they do, but it's not your fault. Hi, I'm Justin. I'm a Scalcom librarian. My pronouns are he and they.

Sadie:
[5:14] I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they and them.

Jay:
[5:18] I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian, and my pronouns are he and him.

Justin:
[5:21] And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Rachel:
[5:24] Yeah, sure. Well, at the time of recording, my name is Rachel Fleming, and I use they and them pronouns, and I am a scholarly communications librarian at an academic library.

Justin:
[5:34] Welcome. I love the mystery of at the time of recording.

Rachel:
[5:38] I just want to, you know, the historical record we're creating right now. So who knows what the future holds?

Jay:
[5:45] We are an archive and we'll piss off every archivist by saying so. Like we're a bunch of historians.

Justin:
[5:54] I mean, we've had probably three pronoun changes on this show so far, so it's not bad. No, transition.

Rachel:
[6:03] We'll work on it.

Justin:
[6:04] Yeah. And the trans and transcription, I don't know. That didn't work.

Rachel:
[6:09] Yeah. Can't try too hard to make jokes.

Justin:
[6:11] We do have transcripts of the episodes now. If people have not noticed, they are in the show notes. So if you do want to go, I think the past 20 episodes or so have full transcripts. So they are available. And also there's a Discord. So people don't forget about that. I need to probably throw in these reminders every 10 episodes or so for new people coming in because new people are still finding us, which I find exciting because I don't know how. If you haven't found us yet, where have you been? I think new people just go to grad school and become librarians and then start finding us.

Rachel:
[6:47] Yeah, hop in the Discord. It's a fun time in there.

Justin:
[6:49] Yeah. I mean, literally, we were doing an event in the Discord, and I thought, you know, Rachel's really good at talking. We should actually just get him on the podcast.

Rachel:
[6:59] Yeah, I do my best. I love to talk. A friend of mine told me once that I had streamer voice, and in the moment, I was offended. But looking back on it i'm like no that that that's probably that's right i should start streaming you.

Jay:
[7:21] Don't sound like what's up gamers like you don't sound like that though.

Rachel:
[7:24] I'm like i'm like chill streamer chill streamer yeah you can imagine me describing exactly what i'm doing you're.

Jay:
[7:30] Playing like what.

Rachel:
[7:31] Is like.

Jay:
[7:31] Power washer extreme.

Rachel:
[7:32] Or something i am playing at all at all times yeah power.

Sadie:
[7:36] Wash simulator hell.

Rachel:
[7:37] Yeah yeah i've got all the all the dlc even if i don't know that property.

Justin:
[7:43] There's like Honey Bee Simulator now, which I'm really like, hmm.

Rachel:
[7:48] There's some really fun simulators. If you want one, my top rec for a just a big run around a world simulator is Satisfactory. And my favorite game of all time is Hard Space Shipbreaker, which also has a unionization plot line.

Sadie:
[8:08] Nice.

Justin:
[8:09] Yeah. Slancer. I mean to get into that one. I don't know. Goat Simulator was also really good.

Jay:
[8:17] I thought you were going to say something else for like half a second and then it wasn't that.

Rachel:
[8:24] Satisfactories from the same folks as Goat Simulator. And it has a very beautiful world and some really excellent world building in nothingness. There's just some ridiculous things that they do because they can. And it's pretty beautiful. And it's one of those games that we're like, what if I just don't do what it tells me to? And you can have a really great time just like living your own life.

Justin:
[8:47] Well, speaking of living your life, I wanted to start off by kind of just getting your background as in how did you get into libraries? Because I've listened to you talk about career and mid-career and late career, and we're going to talk about peer mentoring. So how did you get into libraries?

Rachel:
[9:07] Yeah, so I went to a liberal arts college and I majored in history, which is just a wealth of job opportunities that you have with an undergraduate history degree. So I got a job in an office and it was not great. And I thought to myself, I didn't hate working in the library as an undergraduate, and I probably won't hate being a librarian. And that's the thought process I had was not like, I love libraries. I was like, this probably won't suck all the time. And after almost 20 years of experience, it just panned out. It doesn't suck all the time. So I went to library school and I was very lucky in a lot of ways and got into acquisitions and collection management, which I did for about 11 years. And then I transitioned into scholarly communications, which I've been doing for seven years now at my current institution.

Justin:
[10:04] It's interesting because those two subfields are kind of merging, and I feel like scholarly communication is going to be subsumed into collections again.

Rachel:
[10:13] It is really interesting to see what's kind of happening with scholarly communications. You can see kind of at big universities how their departments are being reorganized. I think we have in SkullCom a lot of people who have come from either instruction and reference and also from acquisitions and tech services, and they bring kind of different kinds of knowledge to scholarly communications. But you see kind of institutional publishing, repositories, and open science and open access kind of being pulled together into like an open junk department. And it's fascinating to see kind of how what's happening as it matures as a subdiscipline.

Justin:
[10:59] Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a lot of different ways into it. How did you end up swapping over?

Rachel:
[11:04] Well, I came from a job where my main role was kind of as a purchasing person and budgets. And when I was looking for a new spot, I was trying to get out of, I was trying to like really step back out of a career path towards administration. And I was looking for something that was more connected with users and faculty. I was, you know, you know, at my first job, I was able to do a lot of instruction and working with faculty. And then the more bigger and bigger institutions I got into, I was more and more separated from everyone until it was just like, I only talked to some other librarians. I like didn't even talk to faculty. So I saw this job posting, which involved a little bit of collection analysis, but also pulling together scholarly communication services, which hadn't previously been under a single person's purview. And unlike all the other jobs that I was looking at for department heads, my reaction to that job was, that seems fun. And that's something I really needed after the kinds of negative experiences that I had at a couple of institutions. So I went, took a pay cut and just like started over. And it's been a really, a really good thing that I've done. And I've been here a long time now.

Justin:
[12:22] Does that, does sort of the peer mentoring part of your journey, was that involved in like that transition? Like, did you reach out to other people who were SkullCon people or did you meet SkullCon people after you got the job? Like, how did you restart? arc.

Rachel:
[12:39] Yeah. I mean, I think in my decision to jump tracks, it's a hard decision to make, especially when it means a lateral move where you might take a pay cut because you're basically starting again. That's a hard thing to do for a lot of people. But I had a great peer mentoring and network of folks in the acquisitions area that I developed during my time in that field. And it's the kind of group where I can really be like, I'm not sure that this is for me and really have an honest discussion about what I want to do and what's a reasonable feeling to have at work. If you don't know this, not wanting to get out of bed in the morning is not a reasonable feeling to have about your job and if you can, you should do something about it. But then once I decided to jump in, it was like the prime of library Twitter time. So there was a lot of easy networking to be done, especially in scholarly communications. And so that was really a great way to kind of brush up. But I already had kind of, you know, some professional networks established, which made it a lot easier to kind of get up to speed.

Jay:
[13:56] I feel like the prime of library Twitter was like just Scolcom and just cataloging, folks.

Rachel:
[14:01] It could be. It could be.

Jay:
[14:02] Maybe that's just the circles I knew, but I feel like that's all it was.

Rachel:
[14:07] Yeah, it was a day. I mean, I remember there being a point where I was like, oh, no, I'm too old for this now. So I left in phases, but I definitely was like a point where I like, oh, these are young people conversations. And I like extracted myself from them.

Justin:
[14:27] I feel like on Tumblr, there was a larger percentage of special collections people because of the format and a lot of like archives people and they were, you know, posting, hey, look at this weird stuff we found in a drawer. There was a lot more of that.

Jay:
[14:45] Also a lot of public librarians and like the more like children's or teen librarian or just like general public librarian type people, I feel like were on Tumblr.

Sadie:
[14:57] I always found it easier to find other public library people on Tumblr than Twitter. I never really got too deep into Twitter, probably a lot for that reason. So it was like institutions, but not like actual individual people with personalities, it seemed like.

Rachel:
[15:13] Yeah see i think there's a generation of like young academics like professors and and people doing their graduate work that you could just like get involved with too on on twitter at in that kind of like 2015 to 2020 time yeah.

Jay:
[15:30] Like i remember when netanel would like like we'd be at like there'd be a conference going on if netanel was at it he would just live tweet every single session he was in like twitter was where like if you couldn't go to a conference.

Rachel:
[15:43] That's how you could just find everything that was happening yeah yeah.

Justin:
[15:48] Yeah i would usually set up like a tweet deck feed for a conference.

Rachel:
[15:52] Yeah yeah absolutely and.

Justin:
[15:54] He would just watch the feed scroll by.

Rachel:
[15:56] R.i.p.

Jay:
[15:57] Yeah r.i.p.

Rachel:
[15:58] Well i have this question for you guys can i ask you like um Now that you're not, well, maybe you're still on those social networks, but what kind of group chats you got going on in your phone and what kind of discords are you in? Who's in your network online and in real life? How would you describe those groups?

Jay:
[16:19] My phone and my Instagram is a lot of local Boston radical organizing that I'm in. So my signal and text messages and stuff. Blue Sky is a lot of people that mutually followed from Twitter, largely some queer academic type people. And then the discords that I'm in are like some library related, my like TTRPG group I'm in and like various podcasts that I'm in the Patreon for. And that's like it. And I don't really, I'm not really on Blue Sky all that much still. I mean, I'm on it more now, but it's not like the heyday of like being on Twitter, like 10 hours of my waking life every day.

Sadie:
[17:02] Yeah, I'm not in a lot of Discords. My phone is pretty much just all personal conversations with friends and family and stuff. I don't do a lot of networking that way. I'm really bad at networking. I find it kind of painful. So I just have never gotten the hang of it. And in Discord, I think our Discord is the only library-related one I have. I'm part of one for the free company that I'm in on the MMO that I play, and one for a gamer stream that I really like, and I think one from Radio Free Totebag, which is friends of the pod who've been on several times. I'm in their Discord too. And yeah, I don't really use Blue Sky a whole lot, and most of it has just been mutual follows coming over from Twitter or like guests we've had on here a lot of times. So yeah, I'm just not a very heavily networking person, I guess.

Justin:
[18:00] Yeah, I jumped onto BlueSky early because there were a lot of people who left Twitter quite a while ago, and I was hoping to reconnect with them on BlueSky or Mastodon. Mastodon ended up not working for me very well, just the interface I didn't really like and the notifications on my phone. It just didn't really work, but I'm pretty much more or less off Twitter now. I don't have it on my phone anymore. Actually, there's so few people and there's so much just junk on my timeline that what I've started doing is just turning on alerts for when people I know tweet. So then I just go through that and then I close it on browser. So it's really just like a handful of people on Twitter anymore. Blue Sky, we've been doing pretty good. I use the podcast account because it's just more fun. And we continue to get waves of people like new librarians, people who are getting us from the starter packs. Yeah instagram i really have never used except to just follow like comic artists who were no longer posting on tumblr because that was one of the main things i used tumblr for was following artists and when people kind of stopped posting there either because they aged out or like got into illustration careers or they just stopped doing illustration online so to find new people who are making web comics you put over to instagram because that's just where they post now And then, yeah, the Discord, our Discord, Radio Free Totebag.

Justin:
[19:28] The SkullCom Shit Talk Discord, there is one for the O'Neill community I'm in, so the negotiations group for library acquisitions. And there are a couple conference ones that I think run throughout the year. Like, I think OpenEd stays open.

Rachel:
[19:45] Yeah, some of those are kind of like only active during the conference season.

Justin:
[19:51] Yeah, which is something I was thinking about today is, you know, library organizations like Library Publishing Coalition, you know, they're not active all the time. Like Texas Digital Libraries, I think, had like a Slack that was pretty popular, but I just never used Slack for anything else. So I, you know, I wasn't going to get on it just for TDL people, but that got like really active on their end, but I was never a part of it. So there was a lot that I missed out on in there, particularly like 2020, 2021, a lot of socializing was going on there. And they used to do, I was also thinking about like these hangouts we used to do with Texas Digital Libraries and we were all swapping information and it was like an unstructured hangout, but we were, you know, on the one hand getting our socializing in, but also saying like, you know, here's this new problem we're running into because of COVID. That was really helpful. I mean, it was sad when they shut down because I was kind of like, really getting into it so you know i just feel like certain things haven't haven't gotten back to normal or pre-2020 and so there's still certain ways in which like communication doesn't work the same way some things that we've done in like my department is like i run a skull com meeting every other month for the system so i get people from the universities in the system to talk to and same thing for open education or open education librarian runs the same thing yeah Yeah.

Rachel:
[21:19] Do you find that to be like a kind of heavy lift to do the like logistical work on that and try and encourage people to just come to an unstructured meeting?

Justin:
[21:29] Yeah, I mean, attendance hasn't been great. I think it might be it's too infrequent. Like maybe if I made it more frequent, people would show up more. And I try to like have a structure so that like each of us just kind of reports what's happening and then we follow up on things from the last meeting. So I do always have like meeting notes, but I've never been able to really structure an agenda because it's mostly like, you know, what are you working on? And then a lot of it is like, you know, we have this new transformative agreement and it's like, oh, did you guys go with that one? Because that's the only thing that we really differ on is like some of us will go for some of these packages or not. And it's like, you know, did you decide to do it? Did you not decide to do it?

Rachel:
[22:09] I mean, answer the first question and then I'll talk more about why I asked you that one. Yeah, so I have kind of, most of my group chats are like migrated group chats from Twitter. So I've got like a group of kind of radical leftist Jews and a group of queer librarians who I formed a group message with because I wanted to talk with like these four people specifically about Janelle Monae. And it's just like, now we're just still like a core friend group. And then a couple of similar Skullcombed Discord and a couple of other library Discords and another just random group chats. I was thinking earlier how kind of, message boards have always been a space where like yeah you're in a fc or something and it's like yeah my dear friend who i would share like i who i share my life with because we play a video game together and how like there's people i guess probably in college now whose best friends are from like some random minecraft server you know like the way that we form bonds is not like it, channels and it's sometimes happens in unexpected ways and unexpected places um yeah one of.

Jay:
[23:31] My best friends from high school met her husband on like an online forum that they were both.

Rachel:
[23:37] Yeah yeah yeah well that's been happening for generations yeah yeah but justin to to your point like i also like work on like ir and open education and and whenever i have a meeting with another colleague in the state who has similar job responsibilities, we're always like, oh my God, it's so great to know that you're dealing with these same issues and like, how do you handle this? And like, it's always so useful in not feeling alone and just like hearing how other people will handle it. You know, we work in organizations sometimes with like dozens and hundreds of people, but it's really a lot of positions where there's only one person who has specific responsibilities in libraries and it can be really lonely even though you're in a big organization because the people you're working with aren't dealing with your specific struggles but there's also dozens and hundreds of people out there who are so it can be really important to like find them and like that's what's so useful about going to a conference right it's like oh yeah you know you're interested in the same stuff as me and like that's super exciting.

Jay:
[24:50] I am so glad that within my first year of librarianship, I went to so many conferences because of all the different fellowships and scholarships that there are. So I went to so many in-person conferences my first year being a librarian, and I'm so glad I did because I met so many cool people, including people I had been networking with on library Twitter. I got to form these professional relationships and friendships that are like, I'm still friends with y'all today.

Rachel:
[25:18] Yeah.

Jay:
[25:19] Pay your new librarians to go to conferences, like six of them.

Rachel:
[25:23] Like first year. Yeah, it's great that we have access in a lot more ways than we did before COVID, but it's really hard to replicate the kind of free form interaction that you can have in a passing period or at a dine around. And and and you have to go with that mode of like i'm just gonna walk up to this presenter and be like hey we're on the same page about this stuff i want to talk more about it with you like you've got to really get into that zone of like this is somebody who like is a future friend or collaborator that's how i made some of my dearest friends in libraries is like oh i agreed with everything you said on that panel and i want to talk to you more about it let's go eat a hamburger like.

Justin:
[26:10] Yeah i always get i think i've always had trouble networking in person because i do tend to get like very socially exhausted very.

Rachel:
[26:18] Quickly in a big thing.

Justin:
[26:20] Like that so i'm always like running back to my hotel room to like lay down for an hour or something so it is kind of like a lot of people i've networked with at conferences was kind of just people i was already talking to online and And it's like, oh, we're both going to be there. Why don't we go hang out? So it's like acquaintances online. And then it's like, okay, let's all go get lunch. And then you get to meet more people in person. That's pretty much always the way it's worked for me.

Rachel:
[26:47] Like strengthening the bond that you already have. So you're more likely to send them an email instead of just like... There's a difference between being a mutual and being in a group chat, you know? Yeah.

Jay:
[27:00] That's a good point.

Rachel:
[27:01] So you want to like level up your friends.

Justin:
[27:04] Yeah, I think that was a big part of it. And I really didn't have money for travel for a few years. So until I got into this job, I didn't really have funding to go to big conferences. So then I finally went to like ACRL and got to experience like, you know, the really, really big groups of people. And still, you know, we run into like four or five or I'm trying to think of what conference this was. Might have been open ed. I think open ed was probably one of the best networking experiences I had was the open education conference. In terms of like raw numbers of meeting people, going to like really big dinners with a bunch of people, doing a lot of socializing. That was kind of like one of the more successful ones for me. So I don't know. I'm going to be going to ALA this year, I think. So I'll see how that goes. Well, we can meet up.

Rachel:
[27:56] I'll be there. I have the all governance, no fun ALA schedule. So I'll be at a meeting, but I will be there.

Jay:
[28:07] I'm going to try to go and only for fun.

Justin:
[28:09] You put in a link about workforce development versus education and skills versus knowledge. I didn't have time to look at that. What's that?

Rachel:
[28:16] Well, I was thinking about this question that was one of the earliest works that I was really getting into some of this kind of mentoring and peer mentoring work with Lizzie Cronk. And we were kind of addressing this question in acquisitions librarianship that, you know, many people are saying, I've heard it said, they don't teach about this in library school. And reflecting on that, we got to thinking, well, is it even possible to teach that job in library school? So what does it mean to prepare yourself for your future job? What does it mean to prepare yourself for a career? Maybe those are different, right? So this is the quote that I have in my email footer, which I read a long time ago when I was reading library scholarship for fun.

Rachel:
[29:14] I came across this profile of a librarian at Princeton Theological Cemetery who, when he was building that library, was reflecting that, you know, what we're trying to do in the educational project as we prepare our young people for their future is not give them information or books, but instead to teach them how to think, right? So this quote is, reading should not be substituted for thinking. Books are not properly used but abused when they are allowed to supersede the exercise of our own faculties. We must cultivate independence of mind. And I think it's important, I think, for librarians especially to remember that the books aren't knowledge. The books are an artifact. And if you believe that we can have knowledge, which sometimes I don't, it's something that we have to each create ourselves. So I like to think about what do we need from school to get people ready?

Rachel:
[30:21] When I think about, does library school prepare you to be a librarian? Absolutely. Everybody has been prepared in a certain way. I don't know if it prepares you for your job, but I don't know that that's something that we want it to do. I don't think if you go to Votek and get a diesel repair certificate, the important thing that you learn there is not how to repair the specific engine you learned on. You learned how to think about engine repair. That's what's important about the educational process. Experience that you had sorry my dog is banging on something, so when so when we i think in practice we have this tendency to be like oh they just didn't teach us in library school when one we don't know it's been 20 years since i was in library school i have no idea what they teach people in library school um but also like we want whatever deficiencies we see in new personnel to be somebody else's problem and somebody else's fault. When, you know, if you have a new professional coming in in any situation, we have some obligation to, like, help people grow and learn how to do the job. I didn't know how to be a scholarly communications librarian when I got my new job. I had to learn a whole bunch of new stuff.

Justin:
[31:43] Yeah. I mean, I remember the experience of jumping into library school when you feel like you missed like the first year, like you were supposed to know a lot of stuff going into it because the faculty have been teaching for years and they've already been immersed in all the concepts. And then you jump in and you're just like, they're like, okay, week one, we're going to make a pathfinder. And like, no one tells you what a pathfinder is. And they're just throwing this word at you. And it's like, I don't even know what, and I've not used that word outside of library school, by the way. Everyone just calls them lip guides. It's the proprietary name, but yeah. Yeah, you feel like you were thrown in the middle of a class, even though it's, you know, this is your intro classes.

Rachel:
[32:22] Yeah. And if you're learning a specific tool, that's not preparing you, right? I'm going to see the IT person nodding, right? Like when I was in college, people were learning C++. That was not a useful thing to know necessarily.

Sadie:
[32:36] But knowing how to program is a different thing than knowing a programming language.

Rachel:
[32:44] Absolutely. Yeah.

Sadie:
[32:45] So, well, and like when I was in IT school, I was really frustrated by how much of it was like, do this step, then do this step, then do this step. And it wasn't very like, and I'm the same way with math. It's like, I need to know the reason behind these things and that's how I synthesize it and then can apply it further. But in the IT world, there's a lot more proprietary. This is how you use this thing. This is how you use this thing. These are all like...

Sadie:
[33:12] It's a microsoft product so it's a microsoft certification for a microsoft thing or there's you know like your specific kind of firewall kind of training and it's like those don't always they don't translate very well to other things but once you start getting your hands in enough systems you can start to see how the wheels turn right and like i get on this all of the time at work and and on the podcast but i feel like there is so much parallel between doing a reference interview for a patron at a desk and troubleshooting technology issues like they're both ultimately about people but they are like very you have to know what your steps are and you have to know how you can mix and match them for that very specific situation to get the you know best outcome kind of thing. So it's like going to IT school, you know, familiarized me with a bunch of stuff. But what really, what really I pulled out of it for myself, because I was also working in IT when I was going to school for it.

Sadie:
[34:17] Is like, yeah, like how to troubleshoot, like which direction to start thinking through steps on, you know, how do you introduce yourself to a new system and get to know it because everything's proprietary and everything's got a different UI and a different this and that. So like those sort of things have, those skills have helped me immensely. And I feel like I learned a lot of those working in a public library as a customer service person. So it was like, you know, talking about reference interviews and talking about like organization systems and stuff like that really lent to transitioning into IT as like a, as going into like a security way of thinking or like a technical way of thinking, I guess is kind of.

Rachel:
[34:59] Right, right. Both of my parents are in, were in, they're retired now, but... In tech support or customer support. So my dad has been sales and service for lawnmowers for the most part. And my mom was in biotech as a technical support person for a private company. And when I was early in my library career, talking to them about the customer interactions that they had, I was like, oh my God, we have the same job. This is fundamentally about understanding an information need and then figuring out how to meet that need. It's not necessarily unique. What I feel like the goal of library school specifically, the specific thing that we want, that we can and should be training for if we're requiring people to go to library school is how to think about libraries. What are some fundamental concepts that we want all librarians to be familiar with. And I was really lucky to have that kind of experience in library school, I think, where it wasn't just like make a webpage because make a webpage in 2005 is not a useful thing to know. I did have that class though.

Sadie:
[36:15] I did too.

Justin:
[36:17] I think everyone, whenever you poll them about what's the most important class in library school, it's almost always reference.

Rachel:
[36:25] It was the class, I think Jay said this, I guess the class, one credit class I took on how to read a license, that was the most important class I took.

Justin:
[36:33] I didn't get any kind of intellectual property training. So copyright, anything, music copyright, stuff that probably would be useful to know. Didn't get anything related to that. That was all picked up later.

Rachel:
[36:48] Yeah. The real faculty experience of like, here's your office, here's 125 grand, go to it. And, you know, I'm like 26 years old and I'm like, oh, okay, you know, and what's it? Yeah, absolutely.

Sadie:
[37:06] So I have a question for as the person who didn't go to library school for the two of you. How much did it get into libraries as like a governing structure? Because like I've worked for public libraries that are their own governing structures within like a county system kind of thing. And like there are unique sort of unique properties there. But like how much do like librarians learn about like Freedom of Information Act, like the processes that go through that or, you know, like how a county budget works or, you know, is there any sort of like beyond just the administration of a library, sort of those wider government-ish sort of government quandaries does library school get into, if at all, at least in your experiences?

Justin:
[37:57] Probably my library admin teacher wasn't very good. So I probably could have gotten a lot more out of that class if I had a better professor i think probably a lot of the governance stuff we would have picked up in like history sections of classes so you might get like a history of libraries class or like a gender and libraries section in a class and that would get into like historical issues and governance issues like the the founding of the carnegie systems stuff like that is when it would most come up And then they would talk about like, you know, donor relations came up in my library admin class.

Rachel:
[38:38] I took an academic libraries class, this one, with the author of this here book. And we did cover kind of like how do universities work as it relates to the library, but not in the kind of detail that you even interface with. Because everything, once you get into it, is a little bit more complicated than when you learn about it on paper. And every place is a little unique, even if it fits the mold.

Justin:
[39:07] And there's a lot of library faculty who never worked in a library. So you also get kind of some practical disconnect of they can point you to the literature on a lot of stuff. But they're not bringing anecdotes into the classroom of like, I had a boss that did this one time, or I was at an institution that did that, or I worked in the field and did this. I mean, it's not a huge problem because there's a lot of faculty who have worked in libraries, but there's enough of them that haven't that sometimes you wonder how library school would be different.

Rachel:
[39:41] So, you know, I think quite good the way that most schools have, you know, a practica experience or something, because it is a field like, you know, I'm thinking of the programs that I work with that have practica, education, social work and nursing. Like, you want to really be sure that you want to do that before you graduate, you know, because you might not once you once you see what it's like in real life and the things that you have to deal with. The other thing I think that really gets into how you can't really be trained to do your job now is that, especially in technical services, the majority of the job is troubleshooting. And it's not by the book. It's like the time that you get the like, oh, yeah, I know the answer to this kind of fair use question is like, ah, it feels so good. But that's not the regular fair use question. It's normally like some weird, thorny situation that you're like, I got to look some stuff up before I answer this.

Justin:
[40:44] Yeah, if I take a photo of a microscope slide, what's the copyright on that? If we don't have a reproduction, if we have a license to the microscope slides, but what about if I take a photograph? This was like a this was like a days long thing that went on the skull comm listserv a couple years ago because i don't think we ever reached a consensus on like what the answer to that question was and it went on for days and skull comm listserv but yeah it's also i mean a lot of technical services questions is yell at the vendor because they probably broke something so.

Rachel:
[41:17] It's just get.

Justin:
[41:18] On the phone with.

Rachel:
[41:18] Oh yeah service and and like it's why i i think of like acquisitions and that like e-resources call com situation is is business to business sales which is just such a weird situation it's so outside the way of that we live our regular lives like that we don't have to learn it once you're there because there's no on there's no understanding what it's like to you know deal with a vendor rep who is just doing their job and isn't in charge of anything other than talking to you.

Justin:
[41:56] Let's move specifically on to Pimento, because I was listening to the video that you sent us earlier. So could you tell people what Pimento is and how it came about?

Rachel:
[42:06] Yeah, I will say, I guess is, Pimento was a project that got started during COVID and went pretty strong for COVID. Four years, I want to say. It was me and my good friends, Lindsay Kronk, who's now at Tulane, Angela Chase, and Maureenie Strub. And I don't know about you, but in COVID, I was doing great. I loved every minute of being trapped in my house, but it's not the way for all people.

Rachel:
[42:39] And some people were really struggling with a lot of things. And I think in libraries, we really struggled a lot. So the group of us, we all knew each other. And we're talking about what are some of the specific struggles that folks in our position have? And what is missing from mentoring opportunities that are out there? So there's a lot of opportunities for early career folks. There's a lot of opportunities for people who want to go into leadership. But there's not a lot of opportunities for people who are questioning their career choices, who are dealing with making decisions under the specific constraints you get into in mid-career with geographical limitations and caregiving responsibilities. So we wanted to put something together that helped people make the space to deal with those issues and provided a kind of community of support. And we just threw it out there, again, in the heyday of Twitter.

Rachel:
[43:38] And we were overwhelmed by the people who wanted to do it. So we put together the seven-week program and it's basically take one to two hours a week to just sit down and think about what you're doing and talk to people about where you're at and where you want to be and how we can make that happen together. And it was a really amazing experience. The four of us who are leaders, We all have been through a transition, so we don't have the same capacity to provide seven weeks of logistical and emotional support. So as far as leadership, it is on hiatus. But the good news is you can do it yourself. The documents are there in their CC by NC, so you can use them. And it had amazing results of we have a lot of people with new jobs, a lot of people telling us how their lives were changed by taking this opportunity to really put themselves first and value, put time into thinking about these kind of tough personal decisions. And having a group to do that with was a key part.

Justin:
[44:48] Yeah, listening to the video, I mean, it sounded like it got pretty intense.

Rachel:
[44:52] It did, it did. I mean, people are dealing with really difficult things, sometimes not so difficult. Sometimes I gave a talk about Pimento at my core forum, and we had enough time that we did a little bit of exercise. And I asked the audience, you know, what's the next step in your career? And what's stopping you from taking that step? And a woman shared that her next step was retirement and that her personal identity as a librarian was the only thing stopping her. And I saw her the next morning and she had already contacted a retirement coach. So like sometimes it's like a tiny push, but sometimes like it can be a relationship with, you know, what I consider like a real peer mentoring relationship with somebody who can push you a little bit more to say like, yeah, why are you feeling that way? You know, why are you just like, maybe I need to leave librarianship? Do you or do you not? You know, what's stopping you from coming to a conclusion on that thought?

Rachel:
[45:56] And that can be, you know, a tougher rut to get out of, or like, yeah, I want to get a new job or, you know. I need to do something different, but I can't leave this state that I'm in. How do you handle those things? There's some really tough things, and some of them are specific to mid-career, and some of them are very general. It's one of the things I was thinking about how I think that y'all on the pod really do a good job of trying to get a little bit deeper into things, where you're just like, what do you mean by this word? Not being embarrassed to ask this question. What do you mean by that? I'm not sure you know talk a little bit more and like it's getting a little bit past the kind of superficial interaction that you might get in that kind of like dinner networking at a conference into a like a somebody that you're having a relationship with that you can trust more.

Justin:
[46:51] Yeah, I think that's probably, I think it probably came out of the kind of realignment of people's priorities during COVID. Because I mean, that was like, part of why part of the focus of this podcast was like, you know, reassessing the values of librarianship and like actually talking about it. And like, meaning what we're talking about, like, do we actually believe, what do we value? What are these values? How popular are they within the field? You know, seeing sort of the radicalism of the summer of 2020, and then seeing the backlash to it within professional spaces over the past few years. And watching that video that you sent just really made me think of that kind of like the rawness of that period of time where people were really ready to, and you could hear it in the conversation.

Rachel:
[47:43] Yeah, in 2020 and 2021, people were just really at a place where they're like ready to and able to just like, well, it can't get worse. Let's just talk about it. And like you said, like have a real conversation. As we were returning to work that that group was a little bit more challenging because we were very, really burnt out and it was harder to have the energy and bring a kind of like how are we going to get together to get through this energy and then and then it evened out a little bit more but like that return to work period was like we don't have space for this and i have the same thing actually in my youth statistics where it's like during covid that's a huge spike and then there's like a below normal as we came back we were like oh no we dealt with all of that i like a disengagement and and we're still coming back to a re-engagement so but a lot of people you know have have had to like for a lot of reasons like actually cope with or or make changes in their lives. I've had a lot of job pools where people are like, I had to go back home to care for a relative during COVID or things like that. Do you think that there's a re-engagement happening now?

Justin:
[49:02] It's hard to gauge... I mean, there's definitely the kind of perpetual problem of like getting engagement at with professional development stuff like the library puts on a webinar, you know, maybe two people show up or but if we partner with the right group on campus, suddenly 50 people show up. And so it's really hard to tell if there's like a mood or if it's just like it didn't get into enough people's inboxes or it didn't it didn't have a catchy enough title. I think definitely for me personally, doing the podcast has helped me stay engaged and like process things as they're happening, because I think part of it was like just giving us an outlet. And I also see other people like trying different outlets like, you know, people started blogging or people started writing or people started art. And so having different outlets probably makes people feel differently about it. But yeah, I think it was, you know, I think maybe some of the death of Twitter had to do with that. People just been like, I can't deal with this shit anymore.

Rachel:
[50:05] Yeah.

Justin:
[50:06] And then you just lose your online.

Rachel:
[50:08] Hit the bricks. Yeah. You can leave. But I took all the communities that I wanted to from Twitter and put them somewhere else.

Justin:
[50:21] Yeah, and we've talked about that too with digital grieving. People, when they're like, if Twitter's dying, I put all of this work into building these networks of people. You know, what happens when I lose that? And where does it go? And then they start asking, like, how do you get into an archive? How does stuff get in an archive? What will happen to any memory of me after I actually die? And so, like, you know, digital death sort of prefigures the sort of lack of planning people have about their actual death. And they start to realize, oh, like, I don't have my affairs in order. I don't have, like, my files in order. How would anyone know i ever existed if you know there's not my correspondence my emails aren't saved my my chats aren't saved i've poured all these hours of my life into something that can be snatched from me and so it's it's good practice for dying because you only get to do it once and most people aren't good at it um set.

Rachel:
[51:14] It on fire i'm cool.

Justin:
[51:15] Yeah i'm.

Rachel:
[51:17] The it's strange that i work in a special collections because i am definitely the throw things away kind of librarian.

Justin:
[51:22] Oh yeah well and You get so much junk in special collections, you get dead people's junk. You have to be the throwaway person.

Rachel:
[51:31] It's the secret of special collections that that's what they do. Don't tell anyone.

Justin:
[51:37] Everyone knows we're not keeping your porn mags. We wanted your money. That's why we agreed to take your collection.

Rachel:
[51:43] Yeah i think there's just so much power in in having people in your life of all kinds so like it could be it could be a peer or it could be a more traditional like power differential mentor of somebody who's further along in their career than you but having somebody where you can build a relationship where you can be like am i tripping here and i feel like when you get thinking about your relationships. Who are the people who you would ask, am I tripping on this? Does this make sense? Those people that you feel safe with and who are they, and who do you like are there people that you want to have at that level and how can you like build that relationship i encourage you to to develop those people um yeah.

Justin:
[52:33] Keep cool people in your life that's kind of the major mantra i have and then that sort of defines my interpersonal relationships is like what does it take to keep this person in my life.

Rachel:
[52:43] And they're and also the.

Justin:
[52:45] Converse if they're not cool then i don't have to put any effort into making them.

Rachel:
[52:48] Right yeah my best local friend i met one of our professors did again in like 2020 2021 a racial awareness kind of like book discussion group and she spent a lot of time doing these and there was somebody in my group and i was like i think we'd be friends do you want to be friends and i like literally sent an email that basically said that and i was like and the group is over but i feel like we'd vibe like and it's true we did and we just like awkwardly had coffee once a month for a year and now we're besties it's.

Sadie:
[53:25] Getting through that that awkward.

Rachel:
[53:26] Coffee once.

Sadie:
[53:27] A month thing.

Rachel:
[53:28] That's yeah that's what making friends is yeah yeah you you gotta put some ongoing effort in i gotta i've got a section of my to-do list which is like schedule lunch with these friends like you gotta just like maintain and i yeah i have add like if i don't talk to you or move away i still think we're cool even though i haven't seen you for 15 years like like you just are like out of mind you know so i have to i have to really actively put effort into those relationships.

Justin:
[53:59] Yeah, I think that's the trick. And it's also it's hard to gauge if there's like a general disengagement from like peer relationships in libraries, because like sometimes individually you pull back and get back into it and start putting the effort back in. So sometimes you're just like, I'm going to just be off doing my own thing for the next couple of months, you know, like a seasonal depression hit. I'm gone. I'm out. I'll be back. You know, and it's there's a lot of that. And yeah, that makes it really hard for me to individually gauge. But there are definitely times where I feel like if any of these, like right now, it's the beginning of a new year, it's beginning of a new semester. What am I going to put effort into now? What new initiatives do I need to do? And since my work is all based on engagement, how am I going to reach out to faculty? How am I going to get their attention? What's going to be the new twist on it this year? like where am I going.

Rachel:
[54:59] To spend that energy right and it could be too like what's your energy level in different areas you know like what do you got going on in your life like or what different things like to me like alright well I'm going to have to like focus on data management stuff I'm going to have to dial back some of the OER stuff just because that's just how it is and even though I would love to just be doing OER all the time it can't be that way so like just being very intentional about those decisions and knowing that I'm going to be able to get back to doing OER, But like right now I have to like focus on this other thing.

Justin:
[55:39] Yeah. I've, I've really had to, this is probably like the first time I've had extended period of time where I haven't had to put so much time into OER because we've built up that team enough that I could step back and now I have another new librarian and I need to be focusing on him and getting, you know, his stuff set up. And so now it's like, okay, how much time do I need to schedule for that?

Rachel:
[56:00] And like, when am I waiting too long? And even the thinking about it, here's the thing where it's like why spending your time on it is a radical thing, because even thinking about how am I going to spend my time or like, what do I need to do to support my new librarian? Or how am I going to reallocate my time? That's creative work that takes energy and time. And we just really tend to be focused on tasks accomplished, and we don't value that time that's spent in doing the really generative work that we do. So booking out your time for planning.

Rachel:
[56:38] Sorry, I knew I was going to turn where the alarm go off. Booking out time to spend on just creative thinking or unscheduled, like, let's shoot this shit, all the Skullcom librarians in the state or the system. Like that's something great is going to come out of that because you're creating social bonds and understanding like each other's priorities and, and what they're working on. And eventually it's going to be useful in some way, but it's not immediately valuable the way that like accomplishing a task feels, you know, it's more like farming, you know, like you're like tending the ground and planting a seed. It's like a long-term process. So yeah, I mean, you do outreach, I'm sure you've come across that, where it's like a long time before something happens and it's somebody that you've talked to many, many times. And then finally, they're like, now's the time. And you're like, great, I've been waiting.

Justin:
[57:41] Yeah. And eventually, you've just done that enough places that you get a continual stream of people coming in more or less regularly.

Rachel:
[57:49] Yeah.

Justin:
[57:50] But yeah, we're trying that for other services now. Yeah. Getting them to, you know, focus on the research data management. How are we going to ingest those people when they are ready? Like, how are we going to keep track of them? So, yeah, and a lot of that work, that sort of like meta work of how am I going to allocate this semester? A lot of that comes to me on the weekends when I'm not doing anything else. So if I have like a quiet weekend, that's usually when something will pop in my mind.

Rachel:
[58:16] Like, concentrating on it, yeah.

Justin:
[58:17] Yeah, it takes time to process in the background. And so there's a lot of times during the week where I can't really get that kind of work done, because I just need it to process in the background for a couple days before it'll come to me. yeah.

Rachel:
[58:30] I like it's one of the things i like to do jigsaw puzzles where it is completely occupying my my conscious thought and then i used to when i was writing papers i would like do all my research and then do a jigsaw puzzle and then write my paper and it'd like suddenly have you know buffered in the background because i was thinking about something else.

Justin:
[58:50] Yeah i would i would read a ton of books by audiobook while while playing like dynasty warriors game where you don't it's just button mashing and that would process a lot of stuff and also i remember when i was writing my thesis i knew i had to separate the research time from the writing time yeah yeah and so i literally blocked it's like it's.

Rachel:
[59:11] Like that's when the synthesization happens like inside of your brain it's not like something you can't force it necessarily to happen.

Justin:
[59:19] Yeah so it was reading and note taking for two weeks and then it was a week where i would not read anything and I would only just leave my notes open to write and then I would have to wait for a couple days for my brain to change gear and then the writing would start to flow and yeah I feel like that happens at work too But yeah, since I think it's been different for me now, because I've been just applying to so many jobs, I've been thinking about what other people are doing. Because, you know, you prep for a job interview or whatever, and you see like, what's the situation at this school? And you really do a deep dive into like, oh, they've completely reorganized, they completely organized this so differently from what we're doing, that it then just gives me ideas for stuff to do at work. So it's, you know, it's not always wasted effort, but I think that's kind of been where most of my inspiration has been coming from recently is just like reading, oh, what is this university doing and how are they doing it? And that's been giving me new ideas.

Rachel:
[1:00:14] I mean, I love to collaborate with folks because I don't think that I have the best ideas about things. And I like chatting with people and learning what they think. So I have not done a lot of scholarship by myself. I always want a buddy to write a paper with or even do a presentation with. I just think it's more fun. And it's also, I think, more productive to get more opinions out there. And I was at liberal arts colleges and regional universities, and we are busy, and we have a lot to do. But at the same time, there's more of us. And it's the same in public libraries. There's great big public libraries, but most of the public libraries are not. And most of the colleges and universities are not our ones. And most of them are community colleges. So there's so many of us. So I want to find ways that we can all do things together that benefit us. That's one of my driving forces in my work, especially on OERs. And I'm getting into some similar work on research data management, too.

Justin:
[1:01:24] Yeah. It's hard to tell if, again, with going back to the engagement thing, are the listservs less active or do I just skim them more at this point and where I'm at in my job? Because I've set everything in motion. It's kind of like, I only need to tweak.

Rachel:
[1:01:42] Yeah. Do you feel like there might also be a career stage component to it? Do you feel mid-career and sometimes you are like, oh, this is a question from a new librarian? I don't have time to mentor in answering it, but somebody else will. I've got the lister of people who just like to happily answer a lister of questions. Because I feel like I'm really getting well into mid-career at conferences. I'm like, okay, I've seen this presentation three or four times, but it's important. It's an important thinking, and it's always new people. And I'm for it, and I love to talk to them, too, about what they're doing. But it might not be.

Justin:
[1:02:24] I do think I skim a lot of stuff where I'm like, yeah, I already know this, or I already know what I think about this. And so my brain's just trying to save space to focus on something else.

Rachel:
[1:02:35] Yeah.

Justin:
[1:02:36] I'm not, you know, and I think it's because I've been in my particular job for so long that there's not like, there's not that new job panic of like, I got to really do a good job and not get fired. And I got to make my boss like me. It's like, my boss already likes me and I've got my relationships set and I've got my job set. I haven't had to do any data wrangling, I realized, in so long because I designed all the ways we collect data. So it's not crap. So I don't have to go into OpenRefine or Excel anymore to fix data because we collect it properly now.

Rachel:
[1:03:17] Oh, man. And when you've got your annual reporting spreadsheets set up and they already do all the math for you, it's a beautiful moment to just be like, oh, I just have to put this here and... It's done. Yeah.

Justin:
[1:03:29] Yeah.

Rachel:
[1:03:29] But it took you like three weeks to set those up. So it's a little hat on the bat to pass to you.

Justin:
[1:03:36] And just planning ahead being like, I don't want this headache in the future. And I've kind of like done that with so many things that now I don't have those headaches. And so it's like, oh, I haven't had to work on this because like nothing's broken.

Rachel:
[1:03:49] Well, that's, I mean.

Justin:
[1:03:50] I think we did the minimum and we did it.

Rachel:
[1:03:52] Our work is so project management focused where there's a lot of work on the front end, and then it's just a maintaining thing. So it's really hard to set up new services so that they are sustainable. Like you're talking about like how do we do intake how do we do follow-up how do we do tracking like those are all the questions and you have to think about them a lot but once you've got it set up it just is manageable because you're like okay well it's going to take you 15 minutes to do that and then you're going to have a two like a 30 minute consultation and then you're going to enter this data but like setting up what that is is like a huge undertaking yeah it's months yeah and.

Justin:
[1:04:37] You I'm looking at medical lab forms, like if the researcher's leaving a lab, having a checklist for all the data to make sure that the next person can find where they store their data and how it's labeled and how it's organized.

Rachel:
[1:04:54] You have that great checklist from the Harvard.

Justin:
[1:04:58] Yeah, the Harvard one. What's the name of their medical campus? Longwood something?

Rachel:
[1:05:06] Longley?

Justin:
[1:05:06] I can't remember but yeah i saw a lot of their their stuff recently and you know trying to figure out like okay does that apply to our medical school how what's the turnover rate so i've got to like reach out to our because i know we've got like a pretty high powered like diabetes and obesity lab like okay what are their processes because they've always been doing their own thing but it's like you know yeah yeah are there inefficiencies can i work with the medical schools research office that sort of thing and can i take these things from this much bigger medical system because that harvard campus is three schools it's the medical school dental school and public health the the chan public health whatever so they've got a lot more laps i'm.

Rachel:
[1:05:51] Getting involved with this what's actually a texas am has the grant now but the folks at, tennessee knoxville are are also involved in this grant it's bricks b-r-i-c-c-f which is building research infrastructure computing infrastructure for community colleges and other non-r1 institutions basically and it's like you know hpc like high-powered computing infrastructure which we have on our campus and when i think about the kind of data we're generating from like our smart cities grants and the machine learning projects that are going on and data storage like long-term data storage for that making sure researchers know everything that they need to do to to be in compliance at all kinds of like every at every not r1 school is an issue and they're doing this kind of work at at all kinds of institutions so it is that's the big question to me is like is what that they've what they've put together at the r1 institutes like it does not necessarily what it's not necessarily what we need at the smaller institutions so like that translation is a lot of effort and i'm like look i'm really looking forward to working with other folks at community colleges and other regional schools to like get a handle on what we need and and there's schools that we're working with they don't have.

Rachel:
[1:07:17] Data librarians, they don't have scholarly communication librarians. And so, you know, there's an engineer who's like, I need to teach everyone in this department about research data management. And, you know, so he's an engineer, he doesn't know about the resources that we have necessarily in the library space. So like, how do we make the knowledge, make the resources, make them adaptable and accessible for every kind of institution?

Justin:
[1:07:41] Yeah, I feel like the knowledge goes in two directions. Because it's like, I remember being at an OER conference. So I work at an R2 and I was just saying, I was actually just saying to my, my new librarian, I was showing him the Harvard stuff. And I said, look, Harvard functionally has unlimited money. So we're not going to be able to do what I'm showing you here. Cause I was showing him like all the different software lists that they had. Okay. They functionally have unlimited money, but for our data management website that we're going to build, let's see if we can take some ideas from that. And then I remember being at a conference in Texas for OER and I said, there's no one from community colleges here and they're doing.

Rachel:
[1:08:19] Oh, they're doing the most. They're killing the game.

Justin:
[1:08:23] And they were doing these like no textbook cost degree programs where you go through all two years and you never pay for a single book. And, you know, there's differences because usually like faculty have less academic freedom over their textbooks so they can kind of be told what textbook to use. So there's that, but it was still like, there's no community colleges here, and they're doing way better than all of us, so we really screwed up setting up this conference.

Rachel:
[1:08:51] Yeah, and also, there's just so much power to having local resources, so there's this balance between making something, that's shareable, but you have to localize it to make it impactful, so, So I want to use your slide deck, but I want it to be easy to put it into my school colors or something. Even that simple, it makes a difference. And the same way is if you're trying to sell open data, the hardest sell is why is it worth it to you, the researcher, to spend extra time on this data that you're already done with to share it? Like yeah it's the same like if i made a really bang inside deck it would take me extra effort to make it like easy for everyone else to use and adapt like take all the formatting out or include all my notes or or whatever like it's extra extra work but it might be saving somebody else doing that work and yeah and it all comes to like it's about like yeah being in a in a community where like you know i where i can find a thing that you already made perfect for me and i can be really happy and then I'll want to do it for you like yeah and.

Justin:
[1:10:05] It's also planning ahead too so that the right tooling is there like for press books like the whole clone a book function the directory that they built.

Rachel:
[1:10:13] You can find.

Justin:
[1:10:14] A book clone it into your local instance change it all and it's all in there but I have faculty making stuff and like soft chalk and I'm like well.

Rachel:
[1:10:22] That doesn't port.

Justin:
[1:10:23] So let's instead of building it in soft chalk we'll migrate it out of soft chalk for you into press books so you're using the right tool now and now it's easier for other people to to retoy or to.

Rachel:
[1:10:33] Edit your work absolutely or like somebody were like yeah you do that and get like because that's where you people who use this stuff live so yeah go don't go build your book and get like i don't you know care, Tell me what you need.

Justin:
[1:10:49] Yeah, with data management, it's so backwards because it's been kind of mandate first and then build the capacity. Whereas Scalcom, everything had to be like, make it easy to do, explain why people should do it, and then mandate to do it. And with research data, it's gone the opposite direction, which is mandate first, then everyone scrambles to figure out how to make the tools for it. And then faculty still have no reason to care about doing this, except they don't want to get yelled at for not being grant compliance.

Rachel:
[1:11:20] I think data management is the same kind of position as like faculty learning pedagogy or where like you kind of learned it, but you didn't really. And so there's faculty out there being like, I need everyone to know like how this will make their life better when, you know, like you're running a bigger and bigger lab. Like, well, if you're going to add like two undergraduates and another graduate student to your lab, you better have an organization structure that, you know, is bigger than just you and your co-PI. So it's, I don't, I do think it is because of the mandate that these things are happening, but it's like, this is something that, that you should know. And hopefully somebody taught you at least a little bit. Like, I know you knew you had learned how to write a lab book at some time.

Justin:
[1:12:13] Yeah, at least that already existed.

Rachel:
[1:12:29] So, I don't know.

Justin:
[1:12:32] Yeah.

Rachel:
[1:12:33] Getting in the weeds.

Justin:
[1:12:35] But there is this compliance edge of it that I find kind of, when you're at a smaller institution and you want people to do it, it's so much harder because there's no mandate. And you have to convince people to do it on sheer, the unforced force of a better argument. And then once you get closer and closer to R1, there's more structure to say, you have to do this.

Rachel:
[1:12:56] Yeah.

Justin:
[1:12:57] And then.

Rachel:
[1:12:58] Yeah. Yeah, like we're in the same position. We're getting towards R2 and it's really easy to be like, look at this chart of your federal funding and that's why I need you to pay attention to me.

Justin:
[1:13:09] Yeah, and that'll get people's attention, but there's still lots of bad compliance out there.

Rachel:
[1:13:15] Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's also like a spirit versus letter situation too, where it's really easy to not have to share your data. Like anyone can not share their data like you just be like this is real hard you can write me about it because i'm not gonna de-identify it because i don't want yeah.

Justin:
[1:13:34] It's like it's like public safety like legally this building is safe but from an engineering point of view it is you know legally the grenfell towers were safe.

Rachel:
[1:13:43] Right but in.

Justin:
[1:13:45] Reality they were not safe they they passed every law that they had to but any engineer could have looked at that and said this is not a safe building.

Rachel:
[1:13:52] Yeah yeah and it's the same like i like to have my campus peers in office of research and be like yeah that's how they handle their budgets too you know like they have to fill it out to get the grant but we wish that they cared more about it and talked to us about it sooner and it's very similar yeah.

Justin:
[1:14:10] Okay well we've gone for an hour and a half was there any last thing that you wanted to mentioned about like peer mentoring or education.

Rachel:
[1:14:19] Well i would just say like take a look around and you probably have more resources than you think in already at hand it can be really hard to ask for help but you won't be unhappy having better relationships with people who are your friends it's worth the effort absolutely yeah it's been yeah it's been like great getting to know you better on the on the discord and so like yeah everyone hop in the in the in the discord if you need some yeah let's get some fear mentor channel going in there or something yeah absolutely.

Justin:
[1:14:53] Okay well thanks so much for coming on.

Rachel:
[1:14:56] Yeah it's been great being here all.

Justin:
[1:14:57] Right and good night.