Tag: out of the mouths of bots

On exhaustion

Posted on by Alissa
A stack of post-its saying Do Less
via @hugh@ausglam.space

I am tired.

Most days I get enough sleep, eat a reasonable breakfast, get to work on time, look and feel on the surface like I’m awake, but it’s only a shell. It’s been a tough year. I’ve started a new job, I’ve been sick a lot, and I still can’t stop saying ‘yes’ to things.

When I’m in the right headspace, everything is doable, and I proudly tell people that I’d love to get things done for them. But when I’m in the wrong headspace, everything feels insurmountable, and I don’t want to tell people that because it makes me look like a fraud. I have little to no control over what headspace I wake up in on any given day. I can’t tell you how frustrating this is.

I have a lot on my plate at the moment. Most of it is library-related. I love what I do, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t talk about everything I’ve volunteered my time for, but I’m on a few LIS committees, I have three (!) conference / PD event presentations scheduled in the first half of next year, I do a lot of cataloguing reading and research, and I participate in a couple of miscellaneous LIS projects. I say this not to boast, nor to complain, but rather as an illustration of what happens when I say ‘yes’ to everything, because I’m still a little stunned that people ask me to do anything at all.

The problem is that whenever I look at my never-ending to-do list, my short-circuiting brain misinterprets ‘these are things you need to do’ as ‘these are things you need to do RIGHT NOW’. Consequently I panic a lot about how much I haven’t done. The problem is, as usual, a lack of temporal perspective. Some of the things aren’t due for another six months. They can wait. Other things are due last week, so they need more urgent attention.

Did I mention how much I love what I do? I mean this sincerely. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing with my life. But I’m beginning to reach some hard limits on how much I can achieve as an individual. I resent these limits (because who doesn’t want to do all the things?!) while recognising that they are necessary (because we can’t do any of the things if we’re completely exhausted).

Shira Peltzman shared this wonderful flowchart with me, outlining how she decides whether to say yes or no to a professional opportunity. I’ve found it really helpful in evaluating all the things I’ve recently said ‘yes’ to, and whether I should perhaps have made other decisions. The flowchart is also Creative Commons-licensed so you can print it out and stick it next to your desk. Note that most of the arrows point to saying ‘no’. I think I’ll be referring to this flowchart a lot.

There’s a great Mastodon bot called Wollstonecraft BOM, a weather bot for a Sydney suburb I have never been to. Every few hours it spits out some weather data and a forecast, but it also includes a lovely little platitude at the end as a mood-booster, and I follow the account purely for this reason. While I was drafting this post a week ago it said to me, ‘You’re doing the best you can, and good people know it.’ I try to remind myself of this a lot, that I am doing the best I can, even if some days that best is not very good.

Part of me wanted to spike this blog post, that being tired isn’t a good look, professionally. But I want to talk about this stuff. It’s important that we aren’t all hiding behind veneers of perfection, telling the world we have it together while over-caffeinating ourselves into oblivion1, because not talking about being tired is part of how we all became tired in the first place. By admitting our exhaustion, we recognise that things aren’t quite right, and we begin the difficult process of balancing ourselves.

Recently I was made an offer. Quite a good offer. And my response, after considerable thought, was ‘Yes… but’. I never used to ask for concessions or amendments, and I’m not a natural negotiator, but reaching hard limits necessarily entails making sure I don’t exceed them. I’m a little impressed with myself, and very grateful that the offerer was prepared to accommodate me.

I’m still tired, but now I’m looking forward to next year because of all the things I’ve said ‘yes’ to, not in spite of them. I hope this means I’ll find myself in better headspaces, where more good things can happen. 🙂

  1. I was recently forced to give up caffeine cold-turkey for medical reasons. I miss Lady Grey tea really quite a lot, but I think not being able to push myself beyond my natural limits has actually helped me recalibrate. This is a personal view. Your mileage may vary. ↩

Tuesday: how it could revolutionise the Dewey Decimal System

Posted on by Alissa

I keep meaning to write this post when it’s not Tuesday. I also keep meaning to revolutionise library classification, but it’s slipped down my to-do list a few notches. Between looking for a new job, organising an overseas trip, writing a conference proposal and studying my last three MIS subjects, I’ve had a fair bit on. Happily, however, I’ve managed to find a spare hour for this most important discussion. Never mind the fact library cataloguers and researchers have spent entire careers on this topic, I’m an Enthusiastic New Professional™ and I can accomplish anything! [citation needed]

The inspiration for this post came from Hugh Rundle’s hilarious @lib_papers Twitter bot. It spits out nonsensical fake conference paper titles which, if you squint hard enough, could almost be real. Fortunately, however, I have the self-awareness to never style myself as an ‘entreprevational full-stack cybrarian’.

Now, to business. Plenty of authors before me have written on how terrible DDC is. It’s an antiquated, anglocentric, angst-inducing mess of a classification system. It assigns whole numbers to arcane topics and relegates vast areas of inquiry to lengthy strings (e.g. the etymology of classical Greek is awarded 482, but climate change, arguably one of the gravest issues of our time, is assigned 363.7387). It demands books on similar subjects be located far away from each other for reasons known only to a nineteenth-century white American man with a misogynist streak and a penchant for spelling reform.

DDC is so awful that growing numbers of libraries (mostly public) are choosing to do away with Dewey altogether. By ‘genrefying’ their collections, librarians and technical services staff are reclaiming their shelf order and reasserting their right to shelve a book where they see fit, not where ~Dewey~ sees fit. I’ve read many a report on the outcomes of genrefication, particularly in fiction collections and in schools, and so far I’ve been very impressed.

My first exposure to genrefication came with a visit to the (then temporary) City of Perth Library as part of a CSU study trip. (I don’t live in Perth, in case you were wondering how I had never visited the city library there.) Like any good mid-degree LIS student angling for a career in technical services, I was suitably horrified by the library’s decision to sort their print collections by genre. On reflection, however, I think the idea outraged me only because it was completely foreign. I was so thoroughly immersed in the Dewey-centric narrative promulgated by library schools everywhere that I had never considered the idea that classification could be done differently.

Certain stripes of librarians take classification really seriously. Perhaps too seriously. And I say this as someone who genuinely enjoys cataloguing. As long as a patron has a reasonable chance of finding a given book on a shelf, armed either with OPAC search results or an ability to read directional signs, and that such a book is located adjacent to other books on similar topics and/or in a reasonably intuitive place, who gives a shit what call number it’s got?

This is not to say that I support eradicating call numbers entirely. I don’t. I believe that we as librarians owe it to the public to come up with a system that doesn’t completely suck.

There is absolutely no need for library users to have to learn such a convoluted and inconsistent system. In Dewey’s day, libraries were typically closed-stack affairs anyway — the only people who had any need to learn the classification system were the library staff, for whom the idea of ‘browsability’ was not an issue. In an age where bookshops are organised by genre and video rental shops (R.I.P.) were similarly classified, why is it anathema for libraries, especially public and school libraries, to arrange their wares in a similar manner?

Dewey is easier for librarians, not for patrons. Dewey means technical services staff don’t have to classify every item from scratch if they don’t want to or can’t. Ostensibly, Dewey also means that any book on a given topic will have roughly the same call number anywhere Dewey is used. Yet I’ve come across numerous examples in the course of my work, in a library which uses Dewey for its modest physical collection, where the same item was given wildly different call numbers depending on the cataloguer. I found one edition of The Best Australian Science Writing, a monograph in annual series, in 500 and another in 800. Learning the implementation of Dewey in one library does not guarantee it will be the same elsewhere.

Alarmingly, I’ve reached almost 800 words and have yet to present any kind of workable alternative to Dewey. I know there’s one out there, though. In the coming weeks and months I intend to devote some of my spare brainpower to the idea, once I’ve finished all the other things I noted above. But the @lib_papers bot has, amusingly, almost come full circle. I look forward to one day genuinely presenting a paper on how Tuesday will help revolutionise DDC. Further thoughts on that will, alas, have to wait for another Tuesday.