Walt at Random

On one of the social networks I sometimes frequent–I think, although it could have been email–somebody asked me:

“If OCLC offered you a consulting or part-time telecommuting gig, would you accept?”

The answer’s simple:

Yes.

Well, maybe that’s too simple. Assuming that:

• It was something I felt I was qualified to do
• The compensation seemed appropriate
• I didn’t report to either of a couple of specific people in Northern California,

then, yes.

Chances of having such an offer: Probably not very large.

Bad feelings I have toward OCLC itself: Zero.

“Making the case” for what, exactly? Well, really, for “semi-” still being part of my self-description as semi-retired. Oh, and for going to ALA conferences (or any library conferences) after this year, as part of staying involved in the field–which, for reasons of real economics and household harmony, needs to involve some appropriate earned income.

To recap:

• Making the Case 1 notes the solution I’d find most desirable–finding ongoing sponsorship for Cites & Insights or (and) Walt at Random.
• Making the Case 2 starts with a surprise (the shutdown of the Library Leadership Network) and considers the possibility of a new site providing diverse essays that can inform library leaders (and managers) and possibly generate conversations on relevant topics.
• Making the Case 2.5 explains some fine points (that 1 and 2 aren’t either/or, that finding a home for much of the LLN content is relatively easy but also less interesting, etc.)

I think this is the last of this post series, both because it’s getting close to ALA Annual (the ideal spot to discuss these possibilities) and because I’d rather get back to other topics.

Research

I’d love to be involved with some group involved in real-world library research, and I believe I’ve demonstrated my ability to carry out focused, transparent projects.

I did some of those projects on speculation, hoping that they would result in some modest amount of income either from book sales or, potentially, from speaking or other invitations. The results–not only monetary, but even having the research noticed–have ranged from mediocre to abysmal. It’s hard to justify doing any more projects except out of pure personal fascination, unless there’s some up-front sponsorship.

At this point, I don’t see how this is likely to happen. I’d love to be proved wrong.

Other improbabilities

When I was first looking for a new gig, three years ago, I did get a couple of offers–one to teach a library school course (after designing the course), one to do seminars. It’s also been suggested that I should become a consultant (hmm: suggest that someone out of work become a consultant–what a novel idea!)

Why haven’t I followed up on these possibilities? Turns out John Scalzi has a post today at Whatever that speaks to this situation: “The Self-Awareness of Incompetence (or Lack Thereof).” An excerpt:

I think there’s a critical intersection between being willing to try things you’re not good at (or good at yet) to learn and experience them — and thus accepting that there’s an interim period of incompetence in the area while one gets up to speed — and the self knowledge (or lack thereof) that no matter how much effort you put into something, you won’t ever reach a sufficient level of competence. Or in shorter words, there’s a cross street between “try something new” and “give it up, already,” and I think it’s interesting to find out, when people get to that particular curb, if they actually know where they’re standing.

I’ve done loads of the former–starting with computer programming and going on from there–with, usually, reasonably good results. I’m willing to continue.

But…

• I really don’t believe I’d be more than mediocre as an adjunct faculty member at a library school, and I do believe that if LIS students are to be taught by non-MLIS holders, those non-MLIS holders should be a whole lot better than mediocre.
• I know I’m not enough of a self-promoter to be a successful consultant, and the question “Consult about what, exactly?” keeps coming back to haunt me. I’m not closing this off entirely, but it’s clearly not My Future.
• As for webinars, quite apart from the ungainly name…well, not impossible, but it appears that I’m no longer in demand as a speaker (possibly for good reasons), and I think I’d be even less spectacular as a webinar presenter.

So, well, I haven’t followed up on these. Maybe that’s wrong.

Otherwise, there are always columns, articles and books. I have one book proposal (yes, with somebody else publishing it) in the works now. I suspect I’ll have one or two others along the way, although the sheer multitude of books in the field (ten at a time?) gives me pause. (One topic that’s been near & dear for many, many years might be ripe for book treatment…) Always possible–columns and articles. But with all of those, maybe books more than others, the issues of compensation and value add come into play. That is: I don’t want to write books that I don’t believe add substantial value…and most books and articles don’t really yield much of a revenue stream. They’ll be part of it, I think, but not a major part. (Psst: Thanks to the two people or institutions who’ve purchased But Still They Blog this month!)

And I think that’s it for the cluster.

Availability during ALA: Most any time Friday from noon to 6 or so, any time Saturday (period, so far), and Sunday from, say, 2 p.m. through dinner time. But contact me beforehand, ‘cuz I still travel without a netbook or notebook or iPad or iTouch or…  waltcrawford at gmail dot com.

This is a followup to this post from last week, and I won’t give it a subtitle because I’ll discuss more than one possibility. (As background: Since I lost long-term sponsorship for C&I at the end of 2009, one of my print columns was discontinued at the same time, and LYRASIS discontinued my Library Leadership Network work–at least on a paid basis–as of tomorrow, I’m looking for other possibilities if I’m going to stay semi-retired rather than fading away entirely. To date, other than LSW’s remarkable actions, there have been one or two very tentative nibbles to which I’ve responded, nothing more.)

Sponsorship of Cites & Insights is still the #1 possibility, to be sure–it’s a case where I believe there’s demonstrated and somewhat unique value, and it’s something I’d like to keep doing if I can justify it.

What of other possibilities?

• I’d love to be an adviser/consultant/participant in a center for evidence-based librarianship, doing and collaborating on real-world quantitative and qualitative research that expands the quantitative work I’ve already done (all of it essentially for nothing–or, in one case, for perhaps $2/hour net results). I have neither the foundation contacts nor other pull/contacts to try to set up such a center; you’d expect that sort of thing to be at a library school or national organization or foundation. Anyone who does have such contacts–well, I’d love to talk. I rate this as an outside chance.
• While I believe I’ve demonstrated my editorial and synthesis skills in working with a broad range of library bloggers to create worthwhile new materials, I can’t imagine who would be likely to pay me to do that work on an ongoing basis, if LYRASIS decided it wasn’t worthwhile. I’d love to be wrong here; frankly, I thought I had a remarkably good and effective network set up, and am sad to see it go away.
• Individual projects may happen, and I’m open to possibilities, but I’m now wary of doing much “on spec.” There’s also the question of whether individual projects make sense in terms of financial return vs. desirability.
• Back when I was considering future projects (with the part-time job still in place), one that stood out was the idea of creating a workshop/webinar/book/resource/whatever for libraries that wished to serve as local publishing resources, either to publish local history and other works or to support patrons who were interested in doing their own work. I haven’t entirely given up on that idea, but after a little initial enthusiasm I found very little ongoing suggestion that libraries/associations were ready to pay for such resources–or that they were actually interested in doing these new services. The complexity of designing the support system to make this work also grew…not entirely off the plate, but also not on the front burner.
• Similarly, I don’t see speaking as a likely candidate for any significant amount of income. I’ve never been a One Simple Message guru-type speaker, I’ve rarely given the same speech twice, and I suspect that the lack of invitations means I don’t really have a great track record–or at least not one that leads to lots of word-of-mouth invitations. Given the sheer joy of air travel these days, I’m not going to push this one hard–and, since I don’t go out trying to convince people they should bring me in (can you really do that and also ask for expenses plus a fee?), I don’t see it happening. Last year I had one paid engagement (OLA, and that was great); this year, so far, I have zero. I think I had my 15 years of mild prominence as a speaker, but was never a really Hot Item.
• My wife suggests using my experience doing PoD publishing, but not on a library basis. She suggests finding local organizations that need or want to do this sort of thing, volunteering initially, then being a paid adviser to those wanting to do such books. That’s interesting–but, particularly with production problems in my wife’s current attempts, problematic. It’s also, as far as I can see, a field rife with paid resources–Lulu has loads of services available for those willing to pay. Still…
• Become a consultant? On what? One problem has always been that I’m not much of a self-marketer or entrepreneur; at this point, a bigger problem is that I’m not The Expert on any one thing, and I don’t have years of library experience. Now, it’s possible that existing consultants might find my background (and name, such as it is) useful, and I’d welcome possibilities, but I just don’t see setting up a library consultancy at this point.

So I guess this makes “2 of 2” rather than “2 of n.” And I now see why I kept delaying this series of posts…I’m somewhat of a Candide by nature, and so far this isn’t a Candide-ish situation.

No, I’m not going to become a Wal-Mart greeter. I’m not a fan of Wal-Mart, and our financial situation isn’t that bad. I might become involved with the local FOL group, but of course that’s volunteer work…

It’s once again been made clear that some librarians (including primarily, to my considerable pleasure,  librarians much younger than I) continue to value what I do. But it’s also been made clear once again that I’m highly expendable. Interesting times…

[For the record: Sales of C&I books since all this started continue to stand at zero, at least at Lulu, with one copy of my oldest self-published book sold at CreateSpace. That’s also useful data…]

Well, it was fun while it lasted…

I was informed a few days ago that my services are no longer required as Editorial Director of the Library Leadership Network. As of April 1, 2010, I’m either fully retired or unemployed, depending on your perspective and what happens in the future. (No, this wasn’t my decision.)

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do next, but some things are clear:

• I could really use a sponsor for Cites & Insights (or, I suppose, a whole lot more donations than I’ve gotten so far!). That’s no longer “extra money.”
• If someone knows of something (possibly very part time, definitely not more than half time, definitely not involving relocating, possibly project-oriented) that suits my peculiar set of skills as a library writer, editor, speaker and systems analyst, I’d be delighted to hear about it. (Anybody setting up a center for serious evidence-based librarianship? I’d love to do some qualitative as well as quantitative research on how library blogs are working and what’s working best, for example, but that can’t happen without explicit advance sponsorship: Selling the results is clearly not working.)
• There’s mild urgency on one point: I’m supposed to be speaking in a program at ALA Annual this year, and with a nearly complete loss of earned income, it’s a little hard to justify the costs of the conference. I need to make some decisions within the next month or so…
• Yes, I’m delighted to be semi-retired. No, we’re not going to starve, be put out of house and home, or go begging. On the other hand, “semi-” suits me; I’d like to keep actively involved in the library field and believe I still have much to offer. It would be nice to have some portion of that involvement recognized as valuable in the form of compensation.

Feel free to get in touch (waltcrawford at gmail dot com). Of course, a solid sponsorship for C&I, including conference funding, would make this all a lot easier…

I feel as though I should write two more posts “between jobs.” This is one of them.

The last six or seven months have been interesting. For most of you, this post was the first you heard about my situation. Things actually started a few weeks earlier, but initially I only contacted a dozen (or so) people. Shortly before that post, I sent similar email to more than a hundred friends and acquaintances.

Within a week, I was overwhelmed by the extent to which other libloggers picked up on my situation, and wrote this post as a followup. I also heard from more than half of the people I sent email to. In all but one case, the responses were heartwarming (and I’ll just ignore the one remarkably heartless response–at least others who really didn’t give a damn or didn’t have anything to say simply didn’t respond).

I won’t go through the other job-related posts; you can read them by selecting the “job” category from the sidebar, if you’re so inclined. I was approached by three groups, in two cases with offers that could be small parts of a patched-together consulting-style future. (The third case is still evolving and may yet be part of what I do. Oh, and I was also approached by Marydee Ojala, editor of ONLINE, with an offer to start a new column there, where I’d written for more than a decade–a suggestion I cheerfully accepted.) Along the way, I recognized two things:

• My respect for good consultants (and good adjunct faculty and good trainers) grew.
• I became aware that the kind of self-promotion required to do this effectively, while entirely valid, was so counter to my basic personality that it would substantially interfere with Cites & Insights and other writing projects.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t go that route, and probably be pretty good at it–but that it’s not my style. We also looked at our budget a couple of times during the long summer (we’ve been aggressive savers for some time, we’re terrible shoppers–that is, we don’t much like shopping and acquiring, and that all makes a difference) and came to some conclusions about worthwhile balances.

In the end, as noted here, a long-time friend, Peggy Sullivan, was the key: Not in getting someone to craft a special job for me, but in forwarding a position that she thought I might find intriguing. I did indeed find it partially intriguing; after a conversation with Ann Yurcaba of PALINET, I concluded that it could be a worthwhile challenge that made good use of my skills while encouraging me to expand those skills.

You know the rest. I’ll start in as Director and Managing Editor of the PALINET Leadership Network next Monday, with a whole lot of learning and networking to come. It’s not a full-time position, and that turned out not to be what I really wanted at this point. I’ll be back in touch with two groups, probably deferring any action indefinitely. And we’ll see what happens with one other activity…another one that plays to my skills while providing new challenges, but definitely secondary to PLN.

Mostly, then, this is to say thanks to everyone who posted, emailed, commented, hung out at LSW Meebo, and otherwise supported me during this odd quest. I was deliberately vague at the beginning, wondering what would come up. I’m delighted with the way things worked out, and could not have begun to predict that course.

Thanks. I’ll see some of you in Baltimore in two weeks and a day. I’ll see more of you in Philadelphia in just under three months. And, of course, I’ll continue emailing, posting, reading blogs, and once in a while hanging out with that odd group at Meebo for a few minutes here and there–and writing and learning.

Oh, and reading: After too many months, I was back at Mountain View Public Library yesterday afternoon. Two p.m. on a weekday at a library with excellent evening and weekend hours (including Sunday hours), so the library was…not even close to being deserted, with quite a few people in the bookstacks, a bunch at computers, a group in the Teen Zone, kids in the Children’s Room, and even one or two in the media section. Because, like any good public library, MVPL cherishes books (as do its patrons) and also goes beyond them, in a way that–to my mind–pretty much assures its future.

Hmm. Maybe that’s the other post, in two sentences. We’ll see.

One postscript: If you see sentences with no space separating them, it’s not my sloppy typing. WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor has a nasty habit of swallowing paragraph breaks–sometimes even when you’ve put in the HTML. Some day, I’m sure they’ll fix that; some day, I’m sure Microsoft will fix the Vista notebook wifi problem…

I think it’s worth noting that the PALINET position discussed here didn’t just come to me–and I didn’t happen upon the job posting by scouring all available library jobsites.

A friend forwarded the job posting to me, with the thought that I might find it interesting.

Dr. Peggy Sullivan was ALA Executive Director when I was LITA President. A few years before that, she was ALA President. She was a pleasure to work with back then (when I was LITA President–when she was ALA President, I was a fledgling in the organization and exclusively associated with ISAD, the former name of LITA). She believes in what she does and believes in people. She’s had a distinguished career. I’m honored to call her a friend.

And, to be sure, as promised in a very early job-related posting, I’ll be sending her a complete autographed set of my books–past, present and future.