A few words about LTC: LTC is a weird duck – it’s just about the only library technology conference that regularly takes place in the upper Midwest plus it takes place in late winter. This probably serves to winnow down the folks who might otherwise be primarily interested in a work-paid trip to a popular vacation spot coughmontereycough and that, plus the minimal vendor presence (vendors are there, they’ve got tables set up, but they don’t have input into what presentations are selected, nor do they make presentations themselves) really makes it for me. My talk’s here – this marks the second LTC presentation I’ve done with Scott Chacon’s awesome showoff framework and I’m really starting to groove on it.

I’ve come to a realization over the past few months that the sorts of conferences I really enjoy going and learn the most out of tend to be smaller in size and more along the lines of unconferences like Great Lakes THATCamp or Code4Lib. In particular, I find myself distinctly uncomfortable with for-profit vendor-organized conferences and try to avoid them. I’m mostly okay with for-profit vendors themselves – though not really okay with aggressive lock-ins and proprietary products – and understand fully that they have a role to play in the library ecosystem, but I’d prefer that role be limited to, well, a commodity relationship (I need a product, I can’t make it myself, I give you money, you give me product) and not as an arbiter or influencer of scholarship. So I’ve done things like sign The Cost of Knowledge (natch!), and I think I’m on the brink of saying that I’m not going to patronize or submit proposals to for-profit vendor oriented conferences either. Going to have to think about it a bit more though.

So the story as I understand it (but told way better by any number of people is this:

• In 2009, Harvard University, an institution with 40 libraries, commissioned a report on organizational problems, a great many of which are related to redundancies inherent in a system as disaggregated, far-flung and apparently historically untouched as Harvard’s.

• Nothing happened (much) from 2009-January 19th 2012. Some staff attrition occurred, but no substantial communication from management to staff about what was happening in wake of the 2009 report.

• Then on January 19th, Harvard library management held at least two town hall sessions in which, if you followed the #hlth twitter hashtags, either everyone was fired, nobody was fired, or some people are going to be fired but exactly who isn’t yet known. When the dust settled and some clarification from management happened in which it was stated that “It is inaccurate to say that all library staff will need to reapply for their positions” (which, to me anyway, is cold comfort. That statement could be factually true if everyone at the library except one needed to reapply, and I’m sure that Harvard library workers weren’t really reassured by it, especially given the gentle suggestion by Harvard library management that workers fill in an Employee Profile which is apparently not-a-resume-or-a-job-application-except-maybe-it-is).

• Exactly what percentage of library workers in the Harvard system who will be voluntarily or involuntarily downsized is unknown, and won’t be known until next month at the very earliest.

Whatever your intentions as library management, by adopting this sort of coy maybe-you’ll-have-a-job-maybe-you-won’t message, you’ve made it all but impossible for your library to function. When people don’t know if they’ll have a job in a month, I’m not sure how they’re supposed to, you know, actually work.

I hope I’m wrong on this one, and Harvard’s badly needed attempt to reinvent itself ends up with as few hearts being broken as possible, but they’re off to a bad start.

I’ll leave you with this one:

A lesson in how not to do it. #hlth

Librarians are obsessed with notions of their own relevancy. We see that in books and blogs and such, and I think you’d have to go pretty far afield before you found a bunch of academic librarians closer to the metal wrt the relevancy debate than my colleagues. That said, I think even the most starry eyed of us on any normal day would concede – with varying degrees of readiness – that the Librarian Profession Ain’t What It Used To Be, that We Are No Longer The Gatekeepers Of Information That We Were Once and that Peak Librarianship, Having Happened In 1990 Ain’t Coming Back, Ever. But the eighteenth happened, and Twitter was overrun with people posting tweets like this and this giving what I’d consider to be a bad message. Do we, as a profession, really want to be the the wallflowers who are only consulted when everything else is shut out? The whole thing gives me a pretty serious case of Ugly Kid At The Prom.

So, take our craven desire to be liked by people who have largely forsaken us, and add into this the fact that institutionally, we fund a lot of the organizations (coughElseviercough) who think that SOPA (and the Research Works Act, and god knows what else) are just jim dandy fine examples of legislation… well, I’m not feeling that great about being a librarian lately.

I’m going to leave you with this. That statement could have fit very neatly into the mouths of any number of librarians on Wednesday. Do you really want to be on the same side as the RIAA? We’re better than that, and most days I think librarianship has a bright and badass future. But that future is not playing as also-rans to Wikipedia – it’s in developing new skills, new modes of thinking, and new service models.