The hardest question, when you're in an academic library:

Where do I find something fun to read?

Sunday on the reference desk, the library gave to me...

5 children running
4 printing problems
3 books not shelved right
2 APA citation questions
And one guy who wanted to go to Halifax.

Patron: "How far away is Halifax?"
Me: Attempt to describe Halifax's location.
Patron: "Isn't it in Ontario?"
Me: Patron apparently has not heard of Nova Scotia. Pull out map, locate Windsor, locate Halifax. Quick web check confirms that there is no Halifax in Ontario.
Patron: "Is it farther than Quebec?"
Me: Indicate Quebec on map, use map scale to estimate distance.
Patron: "Oh...." *sad look* wanders away.

I wonder what that was about.

Architecture

My husband and I have a theory that Windsor has an unwritten but widely adhered to civic law that states that no building or other architectural endeavor may be made more attractive than it absolutely has to be in order to function. This may explain the why the new, much-promoted medical building on campus has its rather nice open atrium design with a living "green wall" offset by the building's exterior being encrusted in what appears to be plates of pre-rusted brown metal.

Quote of the evening

From a young man at the reference desk:

"Oh!" (with surprise). "I wasn't expecting YOU to be able to find anything."

Back at work

And a question: if I tell a patron who is looking for data on some topic (actually, in this case a rather exhaustive list of topics) that I need to know more specifically what s/he is looking for so that I can actually find something relevant, and the patron responds "Just send me everything," is it appropriate for me to reply with a link to Google and a map to the library?

I walk the line

The picket line, that is. We've gone on strike. Having faculty be a union still strikes me as a little odd; I grew up thinking of unions as for factory workers, construction, that sort of thing. The oppressed proletariats earning bread by the sweat of their brow, not the intellectual elite. What would Marx think?

It's all about what you'd expect from a bunch of striking academic geeks. The Modern Languages contingent is carrying signs with slogans in languages from Arabic to Spanish, while Classical Studies uses Latin and Greek. Some Music faculty have signs with what I eventually realized were the first two bars of the music for Solidarity Forever (also Battle Hymn of the Republic, also my alma mater's fight song, but I'm pretty sure that's what they meant). Engineers have gone in for functional notation: f(no)! There are also the puns, ranging from mildly clever to dreadful, and a few sexual references to our administration.

Strike in German is "Streik," which I'm sure has caused some passing onlookers to mutter to themselves "what are they doing asking for more money, damn academics, can't even spell."

I've been feeling, more than I'd have expected, a sense of ... solidarity, I guess. And affection. Marching and attending rallies with my colleagues, spending time walking and chatting with people I don't usually see much, carpooling in. Sort of: these are my people, with their incomprehensible signs, awkwardness and slight diffidence, intellectual chatter and harried disorganization. I'll happily carry signs with them, and snark about it later, just like they will.

Evaluation

I suspect that very few people write glowingly about how enjoyable, enlightening and empowering their annual review processes are. (At least not if they're the ones being reviewed.) So I'm try not to hold the one I'm currently being subjected to to a very high standard.

Perhaps it has something to do with being the data and computer science librarian, but I like things to be logical, impartial, quantifiable. (At least in my work life; at home I'm a disorganized romantic.) Sessions taught, patrons helped, guides and tools developed, feedback positive or negative. Output, that is; actual results. The success I've had in bringing data files and computer monographs to the masses. But as far as I can tell the only aspect of our job that is in fact evaluated quantitatively is collection development, which appears to be judged entirely on whether or not we spend our budget. Which strikes me as bizarre - what if I spent the entire budget on Winnie-the-Pooh?

All of which leaves me at something of a loss when dealing with the form I'm currently attempting to fill out. These are some of the sections I have to fill:

"Demonstration of ability to communicate effectively" with various (specified) groups of people. Well, I communicate with people all the time - talk to them individually, in groups, write them memos, send email. But how do I demonstrate that the communication was effective? Should I be keeping a running tally of how many people complained that they couldn't understand me?

"Demonstration of ability to work co-operatively" with same specified groups of people. Including patrons. If I let the patron ask the question and then answer it, am I working cooperatively with him or her to find the answer?

What if I can demonstrate that I have the ability, but I haven't actually been using it?

And this is my favourite, here in all its glory: "Demonstration of ability to relate assigned duties to the overall goals of the library." It seems that assigning me duties that serve to somehow advance the library's goals should properly be the task of my supervisors? If they've neglected to do so, should I be using this space to explain how I subverted my supervisors and managed to somehow fulfil library goals anyways? Or, am I supposed to just write a little essay discussing how my assigned duties are in fact congruent with the library's goals - that is, demonstrate that my supervisors did a good job in assigning me duties? Looking back, I think that's what I did last year, but the reasoning behind it escapes me.

Princeton's Students

When I worked at Princeton I sometimes half-seriously wondered if a eugenicist consulted with the university admissions department to admit or turn away students based on their physical appearance. They were almost all slender, attractive and free of acne. (Contrast Windsor, where a randomly chosen group of 5 or so may have more size variation than Princeton's entire undergraduate population. Possibly more acne as well.) The uniformity of appearance was underscored by the unofficial dress code - a sort of discretely preppy look that relied heavily on Lacoste and Abercrombie and Fitch.

As individuals, I quite liked most of them - they were well-mannered, intelligent, hard-working. En masse they left me wanting to dye my hair magenta, get a few random piercings and start handing out radical pamphlets of some sort at the door to the library. Some insane percentage of them - 35% or so - went on to become investment bankers.

They frustrated me intensely.

I remember one student who told me that she was really enjoying her thesis research, because after she graduated she didn't think she'd get to work on anything interesting again. She was going into banking, of course. Why, I wanted to know, if she found it so dull? Oh, well, she shrugged. As if the question hardly made sense. And she was one of the treasures - the ones with a spark of real interest.

And that was the thing. I wanted to shake her, her and all the other little proto-bankers, lawyers, financial engineers. Look, I wanted to scream. You're at one of the greatest universities in the country, and everything's open to you. You could study literature under a world-famous novelist, paint with acclaimed artists, learn about social welfare or cutting-edge physics from some of the best there are. You're bright, beautiful, talented. You could be anything.

The selection process for getting into an Ivy-League is intense, though as far as I know no eugenicists are actually involved. The requirements include high SAT scores (generally gained through months of intense coaching with one of the test prep services), high grades in pretty much every subject (GPA counted across entire high school career) and a full schedule of extra-curricular activities to demonstrate well-roundedness. Serious applicants to the Ivies take on the task of preparing for university as a full-time business, with committed parental financial backing. Their parents need to be very supportive, wanting all this for them, the top school, the high-powered career, the hard-working student they can be proud of.

And yet - many of them seemed to have this peculiar joylessness to them. A way of being industrious yet listless at the same time. As if it was all the same to them - calculus, the Comedy Club, track and field, volunteer work, whatever 101. Everything just another bit of resume padding, another hurdle to jump, another box to check off, and they're a little tired of it all already, before they've even started. And their parents wanted all this for them, and pushed and guided them to get there, but somehow, I think, I hope that if they knew, they wouldn't want that.

Journal Titles

A colleague who's involved with analyzing journal statistics sent me a list of journal titles that he thought might merit a follow-up post to the book titles one I did earlier.

Bedtime reading

• Arthropod-Plant Interactions
• Cellulose
• Journal of Friction and Wear
• Journal of Bamboo and Rattan
• Journal of Inverse and Ill-Posed Problems
• Journal of Scheduling

Not bedtime reading

• Calcified Tissue International
• Current Bladder Dysfunction Reports
• Journal of Headache and Pain
• Journal of Pest Science

Disturbing

• Autonomous Robots
• Coke and Chemistry
• Journal of Empirical Theology
• Landslides
• Swarm Intelligence

Princeton and Windsor

I work at the University of Windsor. To take this position I left a similar one at Princeton. Windsor is an aggressively mediocre, semi-industrial Canadian institution, while Princeton is, well, Princeton. This simple fact seems to bother some. Why did you come here, they ask, why did you leave there. Unspoken: what's wrong with you? Were you fired?

I give easy answers: nearer my family (slightly), higher level position, the old challenges thing. True enough, or semi-true. It was one of those complicated dances of family and husband and restlessness and opportunity, and not really worth going on about. But the apparent assumption that one would have to be insane to leave a high-end institution for a low one does bother me.

Working for a prestigious institution can be gratifying. It's flattering to get the job offer, and I was a little in awe my first while there - the history, the beauty of the campus, the feeling of brilliant minds past and present all around me. By the time a few months had passed, though, it was just a place to work, just a job. The beautiful town came with a very high cost of living, financing for the equipment my area needed was often unobtainable despite Princeton's unimaginable wealth, and the brilliant minds didn't really have much to do with me, though I attended a few talks.

The students were almost uniformly bright, but I also found them often frighteningly passive and, well, uniform. But that's another rant.

Public library dissatisfaction

I'm currently filling out a "customer satisfaction survey" for the Windsor public library. Only I'm not a customer, I'm a patron, and the survey itself is dissatisfying me. A whole series of questions asks whether library staff bothered me while I was visiting the library - only they don't use the term "bother." The questions ask whether library staff met and greeted me, made me feel appreciated, offered assistance, thanked me for coming and invited me back. Basically, whether they acted like the very most pushy and annoying sales staff that ever sent me slinking in terror from a high-end department store.

Like many library patrons, and librarians, I'm a book-loving introvert. I go to the public library because I'd rather spend time looking at books than talking to people. That means I don't want library staff to meet me, greet me, or initiate contact in any way. They don't need to make me feel appreciated for deigning to borrow their books.

Still looking for one language to rule them all...

From the Encyclopedia of Computer Languages LYaPAS entry:

Some experts believe PL/1 will replace even the widely-used languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL. If this does occur, it will surely take some time - as shown by the chronological diagram (illustration 2) .

Farming methodists

Not exactly work related, but it is research...

I've been researching my family history online off and on, over the last few months. I was started by my husband - his Jewish European family history seems more compelling to me, but he's expressed interest in my ancestors. So I've been plugging along little by little, and gradually became fascinated.

My mother's family I've always been more familiar with - they go back to England, mostly, and seem to have done various English things over there in places with names like Sedgely and Nottinghamshire.

My father's side was a mystery. He's from a blended family of 9 kids, and it's only while doing this research that I've figured out which were full or half- siblings, on which side. One uncle died in childhood, and I discovered his name just this year. Before that was a blank - we were only in very occasional touch with the surviving aunts and uncles, and my grandparents died before I was born. An aunt showed me a picture of my grandfather, once; my father kept none.

Anyways, what I've found, mostly, going back, is Scots-Irish, Methodist farmers. Wesleyan Methodists, no less, at least that's how they list themselves, all farming and marrying and breeding in this little area of midwestern Ontario where my father came from. A set of great-great grandparents had 13 children, and most of them reproduced themselves too, on down to my father's family of 9.

I have this mental image now of farmers, a whole army of them, with their pitchforks and beards, their wives in long prairie dresses, old ones and young, standing on the land, all looking vaguely somehow like my father. All going to church on Sunday, and getting up at 5 to feed the cows. Some mix of my father's few reminiscences, Little Houe on the Prairie, and Green Acres.

No wonder he fled.

Some book titles come across during this year's weeding

Complex:

• On the null spaces of fully symmetric basic rules for quadrature formulas in s-dimensions
• Defect and local error control in codes for solving stiff initial-value problems
• Some GCD and divisibility problems for sparse polynomials

Dated:

• Faster, faster; a simple description of a giant electronic calculator and the problems it solves
  
• FORTRAN IV with WATFOR
• FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIV
• EVAMEA I ; a computer program for economic analysis
• Job control languages : past, present and future

Curious:

• Zap! : how your computer can hurt you and what you can do about it (1994)
• Programmers : elite of automation
• Programmering ssprak
• Microprocessor background for management personnel (1981)
• Reader's digest how to do just about anything on a computer (2000)
• Enchanted looms : conscious networks in brains and computers
• Marshall McLuhan meets the millennium bug : the first 100 years of computers, and how we can make it

:

The hiring process

I've just been placed on another search committee, my second this year. In the faint hope that someone will read this and that it will spare some future search committee a little pain, I'd like to offer a few tips for applicants on the Cover Letter.

Search committees are cursed by applications. They just keep coming in, more than we want, more than we need, most of them completely useless additions to the pile of paperwork. After a while, we're punch-drunk, virtually incapable of giving your application the special care you probably think it deserves. The fifth or seventh cover letter telling me that the applicant is a “proactive, people-oriented go-getter” who “synergizes and leverages” while being “results-oriented” leaves me wanting to throw up on the application rather than hire the applicant.

Make things concrete. I've worked with a friend applying for a teaching-oriented position whose letter didn't mention her Masters' in Education, another whose letter expressing interest in a cataloging job didn't refer to her five years' experience cataloging. Please! Mention your most recent, most relevant positions and spell out exactly why they are relevant. Mention relevant degrees.

Basically, the key to a good cover letter is to write as if you were trying to explain your qualifications to a young, not especially bright child with a short attention span. Don't expect the search committee members to read between the lines of your resume to deduce your qualifications, or even read your resume at all. We're not going to assume you're qualified if you don't say you are. Use your cover letter to spell out why you are appropriate for this position using short sentences consisting of words with few syllables, using verifiable facts to do so.

Don't even THINK about making us think.