Week 4: Do you know the fire alarm code?
vocational awe and dismissal, managing expectations, and helping librarianship down from the pedestal
Part 1: everything is awesome
Two nights ago, this tweet popped up on my Twitter timeline contributing to the perennial discussion of hiring PhD-havers without professional library training into librarian roles. I thought it was an even-handed thread, more so than the original tweet that she quotes, and it gets to the heart of two dueling perceptions of librarianship worth addressing: vocational awe and vocational dismissal.
Definition time! In January, Fobazi Ettarh wrote an article about the roots of vocational awe in librarianship and how unmitigated pedestalization of librarians invariably leads to librarian burn out and, seemingly paradoxically, undervaluing librarians’ work. She identifies the historical ties between librarianship and religious orders that generated long-standing perceptions of librarianship as “spiritual fulfillment” and glorification of libraries as “sacred spaces.” But you can’t pay the rent with satisfaction, Ettarh writes. Vocational awe is a recipe for overworked and underpaid librarians.1
This counterintuitive awe links to what I have dubbed vocational dismissal, or the practice of obscuring, underrecognizing, and undervaluing the work of librarians and archivists. I see vocational dismissal most often in popular news headlines about some scholar having “discovered” “lost” works from some archive, with no mention of the archival documentation that allowed the scholar to locate the works in the first place. Astonishingly, if it’s been catalogued, it’s not lost. If something is hanging on the wall of a nurse’s apartment in the Upper West Side with no purchase paper trail…then it might be lost! But an unpublished manuscript of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, listed in a finding aid? You didn’t discover anything, my dude. Libraries and archives conduct audits of their holdings for precisely this reason: so they know what they have. For better or for worse, audits can reveal even the most massive breaches of security and employee integrity.
But that Twitter thread addresses another kind of vocational dismissal: the belief among some PhD-havers and scholars that sliding into librarianship is an appropriate “consolation” prize from a distressingly dire academic job market. If one has an advanced degree and has worked with primary materials, one necessarily can manage those materials, no? Vocational dismissal is the notion that the work librarians and archivists do is not actually work, and that the skills associated with that work are easily learnable and transferrable from other kinds of research practices.
Vocational dismissal exists on a spectrum: it is as benign as “you need a degree for that?” and as presumptuous as “I can do that (without any additional training)” (which has the same vibes as my dad referring to Modern Art as “I-could-do-that Art”). I see vocational awe and vocational dismissal intersecting at their most harmful conclusions: that librarians are so fulfilled by their work that they do not need to be properly compensated (thereby undervaluing their labor) and that librarians’ work is so straightforward and simple that anyone could do it (thereby undervaluing their labor).
Part 2: Miss Management
Vocational awe also operates to some degree among librarians themselves (which is reasonable, honestly. Who doesn’t have a rosy outlook of their field when they first enter into it? The issue is when the roses infringe on your ability to see weeds). In an article I read this week for my management class, entitled “Why don’t library students want to become managers?” the author argues that many library students are uninterested in managerial roles because they don’t align with their initial perception of librarianship (which prioritizes books first and people second). They don’t see how managing other people will further the mission of their institution; or, they simply do not want to deal with the unglamorous aspects of management (dealing with crises, discipline, paperwork, difficult decisions); or, they’ve been advised that librarians don’t do much of anything:
“In addition, I encountered a few cases where the student volunteered that a psychological counselor recommended librarianship to the applicant because of the lack of stress in the profession and the ability to avoid interacting with others” (emphasis mine because omg).2
Consider the statement that “Librarianship is just about books.” From the awe perspective, new-to-the-field librarians might place on a pedestal the material and tactile aspects of librarianship—the “traditional,” technical work of acquisitions, cataloguing, and research—and dismiss the programmatic and public-facing service that constitutes many jobs. From the dismissal perspective, uninformed outside viewers (scholars, colleagues, this guy I met at a young Jewish professionals thing who told me I shouldn’t become a librarian because I’ll be “bored within the year”) diminish librarianship to just the public-facing elements of answering questions and finding materials, or having enough time to pursue their own research. They assume that book-related work can’t be that difficult—how much is there to do?
Vocational awe of librarianship also emerges in how library students perceive management as unglamorous and ancillary to the central appeal of books. My management professor began the first week of class by recognizing that hers was a required course and presuming no one was there by choice (This is ungenerous. It’s the only class where we have prolonged discussions about contemporary library-related topics and I really enjoy it). But my undergrad supervisor (who now subscribes to this newsletter! Hi!) recommended during one of the panicked Zoom calls I made to her while deciding where to go to library school that I take as many management classes as possible. Even as management seems entirely unappealing to students who do not see it as central to pursuing an institution’s mission, learning how to manage remains one of the most useful and desirable skills:
Even those who seem to work with books the most and people the least (perhaps professional cataloguers, whose specialty is documenting and describing books; or arguably booksellers, who process and turnover stock at an impressive clip but still, you know, sell that stock to human beings to make money) have to deal with all these mundane management things as well.
Part 3: Water, Earth, Fire, Air.
In November, three or so weeks into my first bookselling internship, I turned up to work to find the stacks manager in the main hallway with a man that he introduced as the fire alarm supervisor.
“Shira,” he said, “This man is here to check the fire alarms.”
“Right, good morning,” I replied, as I began unlocking the door into the ground floor bookroom. They both stared at me. “Is there…something I can help with?”
“Well, I haven’t got the passcodes for the fire alarm.”
I stared at him. He stared back at me.
“I see,” I said. “Have you got a guess as to where they might be?”
“No.”
And so I tracked down the fire alarm test passcodes, which, inconveniently, were not next to the fire alarm test lever. The hullaballoo that ensued involved calling three different representatives at the fire alarm management company, none of whom had our building on file, hunting down the accounts book, which indicated our account had been cancelled with that company, calling the building manager, who patched me through to another building manager, who patched me through to the new fire alarm management company (I’ll note that the stacks manager provided moral support along the way. We were bound to this task together). The poor fire alarm bloke sat in the hallway for nearly an hour as we finagled through the administrative jungle gym of finding various codes so we could turn the fire alarm on just to turn it off again. Another colleague turned up as I was on phone call number five and thanked me for taking care of it:
“Honestly, I’m so glad I didn’t have to do that.”
Fair! It was monstrously dull, but also a testament to the fact that sometimes even book people have to do monstrously dull things! Also, keep the fire alarm test codes posted next to the fire alarm test lever.3
On the opposite end of the elemental spectrum: one day in undergrad, I was inventorying books when my supervisor popped up behind my shoulder and asked, “Would you mind getting your hands dirty?” This is the polar opposite of what I’m usually asked by librarians (“have you washed your hands yet?”), so I said hell yeah because it sounded like an adventure and followed her into the basement, where we took turns leaping over the rapidly-widening lake of burst-pipe water flooding the basement-level stacks to rescue various binders filled with “nothing you’d find interesting” and a bunch of volumes with oxidizing leather bindings that deposited bits of orange and brown in my hands.
The mundanity of management is unavoidable. But shrinking away from people because you think it’ll allow to you to shirk management duties is ill-advised. Having now worked for two different booksellers, two experiences that I’ve enjoyed immensely, I’ve found that striking out on your own, especially in attempts to avoid other people, is the worst path for those who abhor the mundane. When there are fewer people working together, each person has to shoulder more of the grittiest responsibilities.
The antiquarian book firm I worked at in the autumn is one of the largest in the world, and they have employees dedicated to, among other things, custodial work, accounts, and shipping. The bookseller I work with now is a one-woman business (one-and-a-half, if you count me, because I work parttime and also am part gremlin depending on the time of day). She has to do everything herself! Accounts, shipping, social media, scouting, purchasing, cataloguing, collaborating, fair preparing, all the rest. But along with answering all the emails and paying all the bills, she makes all the decisions. Which is, we discussed in class, the appeal of management: managerial roles allow you more influence and decision-making power.
People come to the book world in a lot of different ways. Planning to enter into it, as I have for the better part of the last four years, is as common as pursuing it as a second or third career. Oftentimes, people moving sideways into the book world results in influxes of highly specialized knowledge, which is great. We love the niche! Specialists in generals, generalists in specialties. The troublesome part is the prevailing external perception that librarians don’t do anything all that difficult and don’t work with anyone all that often, and therefore they have simple jobs.
In our conversation in class yesterday, we discussed that learning management does not draw on librarian-specific education and experience. Not much of what we learn in library science from a technical standpoint relates to management. But it’s still a mandatory class, and crucially so: each week, we disavow the notion that librarianship is in some way suspended from needing strategic missions or funding or people who are willing to do some unglamorous work. It is neither just an attractive profession of working with fascinating materials, nor a straightforward job that requires little training.
I don’t really have a grand conclusion, but these are the complexities I see emerging in conversations in both the professional and pre-professional spaces. If we deflate vocational awe and combat vocational dismissal, which I strive to do by explaining what I’m learning each week, we have a better chance at viewing, discussing, and practicing librarianship with both generosity and criticality: generosity with the vision and potential of this work, and criticality with its shortcomings and pitfalls.
Housekeeping and Birdseeding
House
What I read this week:
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. As expected, the sadness to excellentness ratio was in full effect. Reading it was like having someone jab you in the side over and over again for 430 pages and then give you an ice pack only to whack you over the head with it. Highly recommend.
The Removed by Brandon Hobson. Hobson chooses not to explain things to you, and you have to wade through the work despite that insecurity. Well worth the trek.
What I am currently reading:
I like to watch: arguing my way through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum. Arguing about TV is the only other thing I’m good at.
Please share this newsletter with your far-flung friends and homegrown homebodies:
Bird
Embarrassingly, we still have not refilled the bird feeders, so the birds have quieted this week. I’m sure they’ll return with a vengeance when we crack out the birdseed.
More later.
(Not to mention that the perception of librarianship as a do-no-wrong, social and public service vocation that only exists for the betterment of society obscures the harm libraries have caused and continue to cause. I will write more on this later, because my brain is like a Spanish ham that takes weeks of hanging around in a dark closet before it can produce something remotely valuable: in this case, thoughts).
This is borderline absurd because most book people I know operate with a constant low-grade anxiety headache from trying accomplish institutional goals with thinned budgets and reduced personnel, and also the stresses of providing services in the middle of a parallelogram! (Grandma: as a joke, people have been substituting the word “Pandemic” with other words that begin with the letters “PA.” Text me if you need more clarification.)
Edit, the next day after I originally posted this: Perhaps this deflates the humor of this anecdote, but my anxious brain wants to make it clear that the fact the fire alarm passcodes were not in an intuitive location does not reflect negligence; rather, the two people who happened to be in the front hallway and tripped into solving an early-morning problem did not have the knowledge to solve this problem. This is also a good example of how inefficient searches can be if you don’t know what questions to ask: had I just called the building manager to begin with, we would’ve solved everything much more quickly.