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Yesterday I had the privilege to speak on a panel with Kristin Hoffman of University of Western Ontario and Marc Richard of McGill University entitled, "Academic Librarians on the Front LInes", at the "Academic Librarianship - A Crisis or an Opportunity?" symposium at the University of Toronto. We were each given 15 minutes to address the following questions: What are some of the first hand experiences of academic librarians working at institutions where academic librarianship is under threat? What lessons can be learned?
 
Given the tumultuous nature of labour relations at McMaster, I prepared a statement that was read. The majority of that statement is information that is already available publicly on our union's website. The following is the statement that I read.

 
What I plan on briefly talking about is, who and what we are, what we have done and what we have dealt with thus far.
 
Who and what we are
 
We are McMaster University Academic Librarians Association, a union that currently represents 18 academic librarians. The unit is split between two library systems: McMaster University Library with 11, the Faculty of Health Sciences Library with 7. These 18 librarians serve a University population of 21,173 full-time undergraduate students and 3,025 full-time graduate students (2009-2010), as well as 894 full-time instructional faculty members—1,434 including clinical faculty.
 
The bargaining unit does not include Associate University Librarians, the University Librarian, the Health Sciences Library Director, or any librarians not funded by McMaster University.
 
Four associate university librarians and the university librarian manage the 11 librarians in the University Library, and the Faculty of Health Science Library Director manages the 7 Health Sciences librarians.
 
At the time of certification, March 16, 2010, MUALA represented 27 librarians.
 
Collective Agreement
 
We ratified our first collective agreement in March of this year. The agreement is for a 5 year term ending July 31, 2015. As this is a first agreement, it is an attempt to enshrine past practices from when the librarians were part of MUFA, provide transparency, and codify other practices not previously in place.
 
Representation from both campus library systems and from CAUT was present on the bargaining team.
 
Throughout the preparations for, and during the process of negotiation, all members were quick to attend meetings, prepare documentation and provide input as required.
 
During negotiations in February, cuts to the librarians’ salary budget were announced, which I will touch on shortly.
 
At present, MUALA is still awaiting the opportunity to officially sign and distribute the collective agreement.
 
Most recent layoffs
 
In February of this year, in the midst of bargaining for our first collective agreement, MUALA was informed by the University that it had “experienced a significant change in its financial circumstances, which now necessitates certain cost reductions within the bargaining unit.” MUALA reluctantly signed a “Voluntary Departure Program” agreement in which members who have attained the ‘Rule of 80’ (age + years of service = 80 or more) were offered an early retirement package. As of May 1, five librarians accepted the package and have retired.
 
The agreement also stated that if “the Program results in insufficient cost reductions the Parties agree that they will meet to negotiate the terms of further reduction initiatives.” We were advised by the University administration on May 4 that the “cost reductions” had fallen short of the target by over $80,000. Shortly thereafter, one of our members announced her resignation in order to accept a position at another institution. Her departure means that the University’s target has been sufficiently met, so no further reductions are necessary.
 
These developments mark the second time in his short tenure at McMaster University that University Librarian Jeffrey Trzeciak has overseen the reduction of librarian positions as a means of dealing with budget problems. Just two years ago, the University Librarian announced a voluntary separation package that resulted in the departure of two librarians, as well as other library staff. Shortly thereafter, he announced that two other librarian positions were declared ‘redundant’. To our knowledge, these 2009 separations marked the first time in recent years that a University Library in Ontario implemented librarian dismissals as a means of dealing with budget problems.
 
Meanwhile, the Faculty of Health Sciences Library here at McMaster—which does not report to the University Librarian—has had balanced budgets without layoffs during the same period.”
 
Interestingly, during this same time period, the Faculty of Health Sciences library was able to add another full-time continuing appointment position.
 
Morale
 
Low morale is a major issue at McMaster. More so in the University Library. We could arguably have the lowest morale of all university libraries in Canada.
 
The morale issue runs deep, and cannot be pinpointed to a specific event. But, over two years ago, prior to unionization, the McMaster Librarians (MUFA) held a vote of no confidence for University Librarian Jeffrey Trzeciak. That vote was unanimous. To this day, that unanimous vote of no confidence has yet to be addressed.
 
This vote was brought up at our most recent Labour Management Committee meeting, with an overall agenda item of morale. In that meeting we stressed that the low morale has been caused by, but not limited to, the events leading up to unionization, the departure of talent from the University Library, poor communication in general from University Library administration, the physical and emotional demeanor of University Library MUALA members, the lack of recognition of the role of its members, and the damage to McMaster’s reputation.
 
The best the library administration could suggest/offer was for the University Librarian, Jeffrey Trzeciak, to meet with us individually. This was brought to the MUALA members at the next members meeting. Given complete lack of trust, and cultural of fear and intimidation, it was no surprise that the members put forward and passed the following motion:
 

“MUALA members state that given that we have a long standing motion of non-confidence in the University Librarian, and given that we've undertaken a review of the University Librarian that we have submitted to the President and Provost, and given that the President and Provost have established a review of the University Library, we would prefer to defer any meetings with the subject of morale until the University Library Review is completed, after which we anticipate meeting with the University Librarian in a structured and mediated format.”
 

I will be very interested to see the results of the CAUT Academic Librarians Stress Survey. Specifically, the numbers from McMaster.
 
Postdocs
 
There isn’t much I can really say here, other than just stating the facts to my understanding.
 
McMaster University Library currently has 6 post docs employed -- by far, the most of any Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) affiliated institution -- and one outstanding post doc job posting. Two of which are affiliated with the Centre for Leadership in Learning, and it is not clear if the post docs are directly involved with the library or not. But, here are some brief summaries for a few of the positions, and a segment from the potential 7th postdoc job posting.
 
1. Will be researching and designing a professionalization and teaching program for graduate students involving the collaborative efforts of the library, the School of Graduate Studies, and the Centre for Leadership in Learning. 
 
2. Will be investigating best practices in teaching and learning in the field of psychology that relate specifically to models of online-instruction and assessment, evaluation of library resources, and instructional resources.
 
3. The candidate will be expected to work with the library to:

• Identify the current and future library needs of Engineering faculty and students;
• Assess current state of library resources, services and facilities in support of Engineering;
• Make recommendations to the library administration for improvement;
• Promote greater awareness of library resources, services and facilities within Engineering;
• Promote greater awareness within the library of the faculty’s teaching and research priorities ; and
• Provide support as needed to students and faculty within Engineering.

 
All of this is very intriguing given that McMaster University Library effectively disbanded our liaison program this past summer via another round of separations. At face value, this appears to be an attempt at systematically replacing librarians with postdocs.
 
I also want to be very clear here.
 
Systematically replacing librarians with post-docs is *not* cool.
 
University Librarian Review
 
Jeffrey Trzeciak’s appointment as McMaster University Librarian reached the 5 year mark this year. MUALA believes that directors of libraries should be subject to comprehensive 5-year reviews. Accordingly, we undertook a representative opinion survey of our membership in October, 2010, using a survey instrument published by the Association of Research Libraries. The survey consisted of 52 questions addressing five key aspects: vision, leadership, administration, communication and effectiveness, and was completed by 22 of the 25 MUALA members. The University Librarian received an overall performance rating of ‘poor’ from 16 of 22 respondents, and a rating of ‘fair’ from the remaining 6 respondents; he did not receive any overall ratings of ‘excellent’ or ‘good’.
 
The Meeting with the President and Provost regarding the review
 
The MUALA executive requested a meeting with McMaster University President Patrick Deane and Provost Ilene Busch-Visniac in order to present them with copies of the resulting report. Our request was granted, and the meeting was held on March 22. The executive summary of the report we presented to them is available on our website.
 
At the meeting, we requested that: (1) the University implement a formal review of the University Librarian’s first 5 years at McMaster; (2) our report be included as part of this review; and (3) regardless of 1 and 2, we receive a formal written response from the President and Provost on the concerns raised in our report. We were informed by the Provost that the University Librarian had already been re-appointed, and that a review had been conducted by the Provost last autumn. We expressed disappointment that MUALA had not been invited to participate in the review.
 
The President and Provost thanked us for our report and promised to reply by the end of April. I would like to emphasize that the tone of the meeting was open and cordial.
 
The Written Response of the President and Provost regarding the review
 
The MUALA executive received a written reply from the President and Provost on April 11 (the memorandum was dated April 6). They stated their agreement with us that the renewal of a University Librarian appointment “ought to follow a process similar to that for Deans” and “incorporate a review by a duly appointed committee.” The implementation of such a process “should certainly be in place prior to the next opportunity for renewal of the contract for the University Librarian.”
 
Regarding our overall concerns, they went on to say: “we have made recommendations to Jeff that we hope will address some of the issues raised in the report. We are optimistic that actions Jeff has agreed to take will enable the Librarians to work more effectively with him as a team.”
 
University Library Review
 
In June, then president Rick Stapleton received a letter stemming from from the MUALA University Librarian review communication thread, announcing a review of the University Library.
 
The letter states that the President and Provost are "convening a review of the University Library." While they "have not typically conducted ... reviews of the Library ... this is an oversight that needs to be corrected." They will establish a "review committee" that will "be consulting widely". They will "meet with librarians (and other library staff) when they are on campus." Their report "will be made public and shared through our governance system in a manner identical to that used for academic program reviews." In addition, the President and Provost will solicit from MUALA "suggestions for external reviewers". They go on to say: "While we do not normally seek approval by interested parties of the members of a review committee, it is our intention to strike a committee that is acceptable to MUALA, to the management team of the Library, and to the broader campus community. It is our sincere hope that the review team will then be able to advise us unencumbered by any concerns of bias."
 
At this time I have no more public information available regarding the University Library review, other than that it is still in the very beginning stages and slowly moving forward with some difficulties.
 
In closing, I want to stress that MUALA wants normalized labour relations. We have remained fair and reasonable this entire time, and we will continue to do so.
 

When I was at Islandora Camp trying to wrap my head around all things Islandora and Fedora, I was thinking ahead about a possible project in archives and research collections - migrating our collection/fonds descriptions and finding aids over to ICA AtoM.
 
ICA AtoM does some pretty cool stuff in terms of access to collection/fonds descriptions, integrates very nicely with Archivematica with accessioning born digital objects, and associating digital representations of item level objects with their respective collection/fonds. My greedy little brain wanted more! I wanted ICA AtoM to be able to pull in Fedora objects automatically and associate them with their respective collection/fonds. So, this is the hackfest proposal I submitted.
 
So what happened? What'd we end up doing?
 
The amazing Peter Van Garderen made absolutely sure Artefactual Systems staff was highly represented at hackfest, and I had two amazing people from Artefactual trying to parse my sleep-deprived-scatter-brained-state reasoning/logic behind what I wanted to do. David Juhasz and Jesús García Crespo, you rock!
 
We spent the first hour or so working through the Fedora REST API documentation looking for the best way to approach the "problem." After about an hour or so of working through a few conditional queries that would need to be strung together, Jesús jumped in and said, "Why aren't we using SWORD for this!?" Good question!
 
ICA AtoM can speak SWORD and Fedora and speak SWORD so long as you can get the module working. As things at hackfest generally go for me, it failed. I could not for the life of me get the module to build. Spend a some time going through build.xml and ant and I just weren't going to be friends that day.
 
Strike one - don't code conditional Fedora REST API queries - not sharable and scalable
Strike two - I couldn't get the SWORD module to build!
Strike three - ???
 
While brainstorming for other solutions to our "problem", David was looking for examples in which I could share records from our repository. Duh! OAI-PMH! ICA AtoM can harvest OAI. If we can map OAI sets to ICA AtoM collections/fonds, and set records to indivudual items in a collection/fonds we're set. Oh my, another use case of OAI-PMH! Yay!
 
Did we succeed? Not actually. Turns out the OAI-PMH harvesting code wasn't quite up to snuff at the time, and David, bless his heart, worked on trying to get it up to par before the end of the day. We were not able to pull together a working version, but the framework is there. It was there all along! (Ed, yes we could have and totally should have used atom :P )

This past week I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at Access 2011 about failing entitled, "If you ain't failin', you ain't tryin'!" Amy Buckland moderated the panel where we each took five minutes to tell a library tech fail story to encourage the audience to share their failure stories. I think it went over great, and was cathartic to say the least.
 
I shared my story, and afterword I had that familiar feeling of "but, wait! I have even more to say!" There are so many lessons to be learned! So, I'll share the story again here and *all* of the lessons learned that given requisite time I would have said.
 
The story
 
Three years ago I was on an Access panel presentation to speak about a project we had just hit a critical milestone on. Ironically, I spoke at Access 2011 on a fail panel about that same project.
 
When I started at MPOW I was thrown to the wolves. We had received a Library and Archives Canada grant to digitize a large number of items from our collections and create a thematic, cutting edge, web 2.0 website for it. Think tag clouds a.k.a the mullets of the internet (attribution c4lirc). Guess what? We had no infrastructure. No policies or procedures for digitization. No workflows. No metadata policies. No standards. 
 
Given the short turn around time of the grant - 1 year - and the grant requirements, a vendor based drop-in solution would not cut it. So we did it all live! 
 
We took a month to do some rapid prototyping and pulled off a pretty cool proof of concept with Drupal. It worked, and continued to work. It was the basis of our infrastructure moving forward, and at the time it was perfect!
 
In the background of working on the PW20C project, we had the foresight to begin creating an overall "repository" to pull content from - Digital Collections @ Mac. A Drupal 5 based repository infrastructure loosely based on best practices and standards at the time. A standard Dublin Core field set created with CCK for records with our own enhanced metadata fields for collections, a hacked-together OAI-PMH module and some really cool timeline visualizations using the SIMILE project.
 
Flash forward a year, and we have secured another LAC grant for Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing; another thematic based digital collection site. Time crunch was in effect, and we pulled together another great project with probably 10x more case studies. My heart goes out for our project coordinator on this one pulling all of those case studies together. 
 
Flash forward another year, we have what I believed a pretty solid frame work for digital collections. We have a main digital collections site, and two heavily customized thematic sites. We are also about 8 months into a major upgrade of our digital collections infrastructure; migrating everything from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. 
 
We upped our functional requirements. We wanted to hang with the cool kids: linked data, seemless JPEG2000 support, KML integration, and MediaRSS support. Yeah, MediaRSS.
 
Here is where the fail comes to fruition. Mistakes were made. Mistakes were made.
 
There is this what I suppose could be a called a koan in the Drupal community, "do it the Drupal way." Problem is the Drupal way changes depending on who you are talking to and what time of day it is, and what version you are on. Heavily customizing Drupal themes are definitely not the Drupal way to do things. Those two thematic sites became an albatross, and have sense been put out to pasture on their on virtual machines. (Note. Drupal 5 and PHP 5.3 really don't like each other.)
 
Lessons learned
 
Do *not* create custom thematic digital collections sites. To further clarify this, do not create custom thematic digital collections sites if you have limited personnel resources and actually have other *stuff* to do.
 
Do *not* create policy, procedures, workflows, best practices on the fly. However, given the title of the panel, sometimes you really need to fail to get those best practices down. So, how about, Do *not* create policy, procedures, workflows, best practices on the fly for mission critical projects.
 
Your data your precious. Think a technology a step later. For us, then past Drupal, think past Fedora. We need to be able to move from platform to platform with ease. Thankfully we had the wherewithal to structure our data in such a way that it was pretty painless to extract.
 
Sometimes when you think you are *not* reinventing the wheel, you are in-fact reinventing the wheel. Look the the community around you and get involved. Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions. Some of those questions that I thought were stupid and shouldn't be asked were in fact questions that were begging to be asked.
 
Also akin to reinventing the wheel, the hit-by-the-bus scenario. Your really awesome-homegrown-fantastic-full-of-awesomeness thing you build, you get hit by a bus, take another job, etc. your place of work is so entirely screwed. At the very least, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT. 
 
The library tech community is pretty rad. We're all doing a lot of similar work that doesn't need to be replicated, or if it does, does not need to be completed reinvented. Again, engage, and interact.
 
Moving forward, making this fail into a success...
 
Over the past few months we have taken the time to sit down and write out our digitization/digital collections philosophy with stakeholders. What I thought might be a difficult and painful exercise turned out to be quite wonderful and we came up with a document that I am proud of. 
 
We also took the time to do a study of what digital preservation means at MPOW, and what we are capable of doing right now, what we can be doing in the near future, and what we should look to achieve in the long-term. This segued nicely into a functional requirements document for our repository infrastructure.
 
Right now, we are working on creating what I believe to be a solid infrastructure; heavily documented! Something we lacked all along, and what some of my colleagues know me for - that guy who walks around stamping his feet about infrastructure all the time. INFRASTRUCTURE. INFRASTRUCTURE. INFRASTRUCTURE.
 
Hopefully in a year or two I can come back to Access and present on a panel full of folks turning failures into success!

On Saturday (June 25, 2011) I had the opportunity to attend TEDx LibrariansTO and was asked to facilitate an audience discussion group. I tried my best to guide our group through 9 discussion questions. We made it through 6. But! I think we were the only group that actually went through the questions. The group discussion was *really* great, and I figured I'd share the notes I took. So without further ado, here are my notes.

1. What means should librarians choose to encourage their institutions to embrace change?

   * New formats are definitely an opportunity for change elements
   * Open Access -> change the publishing model
   * "Buy it and we'll have to use and adapt it!" [Not sure how I feel about this, but is an opportunity for change I suppose.]
   * "Just do it!" (Quoting Amy Buckland's talk)
   * Challenging and debating each other - we need to do this more, and stop being so stereotypically nice.
   * Embrace dissent
   * Challenge vendors, and take back/refine argument that access to information is a public good (curb external forces from defining libraries)
   * Advocate and share these stories (and events) to people outside of libraryland - stop talking to ourselves. [This aligns well with John Dupuis' Stealth librarianship manifesto]

    

2. What are the similarities or characteristics of thought leaders that you know? Tell us about the attributes that your ideal thought leader would have.

   * The ability to extract and extrapolate common/shared ideas among people and push and drive other people [CHARISMA!]
   * Good thinker/motivator
   * Obsession with higher concepts
   * Dedicated, articulate, think a few steps ahead, and inspire
   * Good cat herder
   * Follow through with action
   * Natural curiosity
   * Radical collaboration combined with finding champions (relationship building)
   * Be able to an idea/project sell inside and outside the library (sell the benefit)
   * Leading edge *not* bleeding edge
   * Savvy -> ability to manage the opposition
   * Do the extra work
   * Thought leader for patrons and the community as well as in libraryland
    

3. How can experience of failure contribute to making an effective thought leader?

   * You *must* fail before you succeed
   * Ability to learn from mistakes
   * Ability to recognize mistakes
   * Thinking who takes an unpopular view
   * Acknowledgement that failures can be as good as successes
   * Need a culture that will embrace failure
   * Analyze other failures to show it can succeed somewhere else
   * Build relationships
   * Learn to talk about mistakes openly
    

4. What venues are available to us to constructively criticize each others ideas?

   * Yelling at vendors
   * Learning how to argue with each other
   * Step being so polite with each other
   * CLA great debate is a good idea, we should do this elsewhere and more often
    

5. What should we expect/demand of our thought leaders?

   * Honesty with provocative statements
   * Sense of humour
   * Openmindedness
   * Dedication to life long learning
   * Push people out of the way
   * Though armada
   * Don't burn out
    

6. We can't all be thought leaders all the time. Often, by necessity we are followers. So, what does it mean to follow a thought leader well?

   * Make sure they don't burn out
   * Help out
   * Step up when things can be delegated
   * Thought collaborators
    

7. Name on thing we could do right now in order to be perceived as thought leaders outside the profession.
    
8. How do we recognize a thought leader?
    
9. Are the loudest voices online actually representative of important thought currents?

Overall, there was some dissent in the group over the term "thought leader". Not everybody agreed with the term, and felt like it encouraged centralized power. There was an overwhelming outcry against centralized power. Also, our group came up with what I think is an excellent critique to the whole thought leader idea. I can't remember who exactly said it, but whoever it was, it was great! "The thought is the leader, we are the thought supporters." If anything, it would be another great discussion piece.
 
Should have started off with this, but a *BIG* thank you to Shelly and Fiacre for putting this together. It was a great day with great people! Also, a big thank you to all the speakers!
 

I may work at an institution with arguably the worst morale among librarians in Canada, but I love my job. I love the people I work with. I love my profession. 
 
There are people *looks left, looks right* actively attempting to de-professionalize librarianship. Yes, the times are a changing, but that does not mean we are not effective anymore and are useless. Technology has radically changed medicine - there are still doctors right? Unless I am missing anything. If anything, we have illustrated an amazing ability to adapt to technical change and remain relevant. This isn't a time when we should be losing librarians, and divving up work among the scattered remains. It is a time when we should retooling and reinforcing our ranks. To quote Karen Schneider: "In the end, what matters, and what we are about, are the ancient truths of librarianship: organizing, managing, making available, preserving, and celebrating the word in all of its manifestations; helping our users build skill sets the fundamentals of which (if not the ephemeral details) will last a lifetime; and celebrating and defending the right to read, however that word is interpreted. This is what we do. This is who we are. This makes us librarians."

 I dedicate each day to the profession. Will you?

IE is a $@#*) *$)#)@% non-standards-compliant bastard of a browser. This is news to absolutely nobody who has had to develop a website or on a website with standardized behaviour across browsers. Some say IE9 is a great move forward, but Microsoft has lost any benefit of doubt in my book. Anyway, my buddy Dan and I were chatting about this today and during the discussion I visualized Renton's rant about being colonized by the English from Trainspotting being adapted to the situation. So, in a horribly hamfisted attempt here it is: 

"It's SHITE coding for IE! It's the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking earth, the most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into cilivization. Some people hate Microsoft, I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even find a decent browser to be colonized by. We are ruled by effete arseholes. It's a shite state of affairs to be in..."

Every so often people ask me about what podcasts I listen to, and every so often I start listening to something new and get terribly excited about it and have to tell my colleagues all about it. Also, this past semester I taught my first course.