Walt at Random

Added 7/31/16: After looking more closely at family needs and health situations, I’ll simplify this message:

At this point, I am not available for speaking engagements that involve travel. Period. Family & health come first.

Which renders the rest of this somewhat moot…

I probably shouldn’t need to post this–but one recent incident suggests it might be useful.

“Shouldn’t need to post this”

I am not in great demand for speaking appearances. That’s hardly surprising.

Realistically, demand slowed down a lot after 2003 and pretty much stopped after 2009: I did one ALA talk in 2010, one book-related conference talk (in a program where it didn’t really belong) in 2012, and three talks (all book-related) at the OLA/WLA joint conference in 2013 (Oregon and Washington). And that’s it.

I’m not asking for invitations or feeling neglected. I’m starting facts. And those facts make sense: There are lots of younger library people with more to say, with more current insights into most any topic, and certainly with better PowerPoint-equivalent skills.

Most of my oddball research activity these days relates to open access–but even there, there are much better people to speak on any aspect of it other than the details of the gold OA landscape. I doubt that my research would make a compelling speech; I’m satisfied that I can communicate via posts, Cites & Insights and books.

The tl;dr version: I had a great run from 1988 through 2004; it’s time for others to have their say.

Not 100% ruling out…

Am I saying I’ll never do public speaking again? I won’t be unhappy if that turns out to be the case–but under the right circumstances, for the right topic, with the right arrangements, it’s not impossible.

But…

At this point, travel’s difficult, partly due to family health reasons (some mine, some my wife’s, some our cats), partly due to the sheer annoyances of travel.

We haven’t taken a vacation trip for five years or more, and I’d certainly place vacation travel ahead of speaking trips.

If I did accept a speaking invitation–and if family issues allowed it–it would have to be fully funded: we’re not wealthy enough to subsidize speaking trips. And, for that matter, given my age and general reluctance to travel, any long flight would have to be business class or better, as well as lodging in a good business-class hotel (sorry, but Airbnb interests me not at all), other expenses and probably an honorarium.

I suspect that all adds up to “You don’t have enough to offer for it to be worthwhile.” No argument from these parts.

[Remainder struck through as irrelevant.]

What I will not do:

• Consider a speaking engagement at all without a clear, detailed invitation; tweets need not apply.
• Be guilt-tripped into feeling that I should be out raising my own money for a speaking trip.
• Believe that I have unique insights and abilities to educate about OA or any other topic. I’m not an educator.

For that matter, I’ve never really been a strong OA advocate: I’ve tried to add facts to the discussion. If I’m now viewed as pro-gold-OA, you can probably thank Stevan Harnad and Jeffrey Beall as much as anybody.

Here’s a calendar of my speaking engagements for the next 24 months.

Now that you’ve plowed through that, here are some notes about the situation.

No, I can assure you, your browser did not fail to display some embedded feature.

Would I be willing to speak? Probably

During my long and peculiar career, I’ve spoken–almost always to library groups, almost always invited–something over 100 times. With three exceptions, I’ve always enjoyed it (maybe 2.5 exceptions), both the speaking and the conference I was speaking at. That’s included something like 40 keynotes over the years.

Ideally, this post should really appear on April 26, 2013, because that will be two years to the day since the last invited speech (or any speech!) I’ve done, one of three at the 2013 OLA/WLA Joint Conference. (Which was most definitely enjoyable, and I’d like to think most of the people at the sessions found them worthwhile.) Or, maybe, on January 31, since that would have been six years since the previous invited library conference speech involving expenses and honorarium. (There were two others in between, but one was during an ALA Annual while I was still regularly attending ALA and the other was, to be honest, somewhat shoehorned into a program because of a book I’d just published.)

Which is to say that I haven’t been doing much speaking lately. That’s hardly surprising. It’s been a long time since I had a full-time job in the library field; my presence in the formal periodical literature has declined almost completely; I’m not a great PowerPoint/Prezi/Keynote presenter; and I’m getting on in years. (“I’m old” is another way to put it, but I’m only intermittently ready to claim that one so far.)

I’m writing this now rather than a few days from now, or never, because of a recent tweetversation (sorry) relating to the most populous state in which I’ve never spoken (I used to keep track of these things, and I’ve actually spoken in something over half the states, along with two Canadian provinces and two Australian states)–namely New Jersey, the 11th largest state by population, with 8.9 million people. Indeed, you have to drop down to #28, Oklahoma with 3.9 million, before you get to the next most populous state I’ve never spoken in. (After that, the list of states spared my speaking gets thick–#30, Iowa, #31, Mississippi, #32, Arkansas, #33, Utah…)

Anyway: the suggestion was made that the lack of a New Jersey speech could be rectified–and that resulted in this post.

On one hand, there’s the heading above. Would I be willing to speak? Probably–given the right circumstances and arrangements. You can read more about that here (I suppose I should update that 18-month-old page one of these years). I would certainly add “open access” and specifically “the state of gold OA” to the list of plausible topics; indeed, it may be the most plausible, given the work I’m doing and the forthcoming Library Technology Reports. But there are other possibilities.

On the other hand…

There are a lot of other, younger, more involved library folks out there

Many of whom are probably better speakers/presenters, some (maybe many) of whom are smarter, many of whom are more qualified to speak on almost any topic you can name.

Let’s face it: given travel costs these days and my unwillingness to camp out, share a room, sleep in a hostel, or fly in and out in a great hurry, it would be hard to justify meeting my terms unless several speeches and/or a keynote is involved. (Given the increased hassles of travel these days, and the fact that it’s a mild hassle to get from here to the nearest big airport, I really couldn’t justify going for a quick in-and-out trip.)

I suspect almost any conference would be much better off with younger, more involved keynote speakers–people better able to inspire attendees with contemporary views and issues.

Perhaps a better writer than presenter

I believe I’ve been a pretty decent speaker over the years (those years spent in the National Forensic League weren’t entirely wasted, although my Rhetoric degree from Berkeley had nothing whatsoever to do with public speaking–you couldn’t take speaking courses for credit in the major), but I suspect I’m nowhere near as good now as I was, say, in 1992-2003, the peak decade for speaking. For that matter, it was easier to get away without doing “decks” back then, and I’m really not a PPTer. (I’ve done them. I suspect some of the OLA/WLA attendees weren’t happy with them.)

I still write a lot, even if much of it’s self-published these days (not all!). It’s not as though my views and findings aren’t being heard. Speaking isn’t the same thing, but the profession isn’t missing anything major by my not speaking.

So…

Willing, probably–but you may be better off elsewhere

Would I be willing to speak if the arrangements, situation, expenses, etc. made sense? Yes.

Am I hoping to see invitations? That’s complicated.

Do I believe associations should be inviting me? Not really.

Will I be disappointed if I never do another library speech? Probably not.

Is asking and answering your own questions an annoying habit? Certainly, but a typical one.

A few words about those 2.5 cases

So what was wrong with three (or 2.5) speaking situations, such that I didn’t enjoy them?

• The most blatant case was one where I’d agreed to do a same-day fly-in, speak at lunch, fly-out (a mistake to start with), and only required that I have a podium for my speaking notes. There was no podium or anything that could substitute, I was frazzled from the flight, and I’m sure I did a lousy job.
• In another case, the policies of the inviting organization were such that it was extremely difficult for the inviting group to meet my expense requirements, I could only attend other sessions on the same day as my talk (as it happened, I didn’t do that), travel got messy (and when I got there, exhausted, the welcoming dinner turned into a multihour hassle that left me even more exhausted), and the whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s the one association I probably wouldn’t accept a return invitation from. Fortunately, that’s almost certainly never going to happen anyway.
• The half case: The conference setting was wonderful, the people were lovely, some of the other sessions were interesting–but (a) I was a bad fit for the conference, (b) I came down with food poisoning on the day I was speaking, so that I felt like I was going to die while I was trying to speak, (c) I was speaking facing klieg lights for videotaping, so I couldn’t really see the people I was speaking to, (d) I very nearly got into a fight with another speaker during a group discussion. The organizer assured me that I did fine. But they also sent me a videotape: Nope, I did not do fine. It was a mess.

I have never ever been to a state or association library conference I did not enjoy–with one partial exception because my wife was along (which rarely happens) and was seriously ill, so that I could barely focus on the conference people. That wasn’t their fault.

Lots of people seem to keep close track of what they’ve read. I started keeping a spreadsheet, mostly to avoid checking out the same book twice. Anyway…

Books* started in 2013

58

Books* finished in 2013

56. I gave up on one (Any Old Iron, Anthony Burgess) and I’m in the middle of another. Oh, and I skipped an Orson Scott Card novelette in an otherwise-excellent SF collection…

Books* by category, excluding the one I’m in the middle of

Biography: 1

Fiction (general): 18

Mysteries: 8

Nonfiction: 19

Science fiction/fantasy: 11

Books I particularly enjoyed (in no particular order) – Grade A

Books I enjoyed a lot but note quite as much (Grade A–

It’s fair to note that the genre count above is probably wrong: the Harry Potter books are all under Fiction rather than SF/F. Yes, I’m finally reading the rest of Harry Potter–I’d read the first one before all the movies, all of which I’ve seen. No credit for guessing what book I’m in the middle of or one that I’ll check out from the children’s room of the library after I finish this one…

*The asterisk

Not included: My own books, a couple of which I had reason to reread.

Other note: This is books. I also read 24 magazines, including three science fiction magazines, and I’d guess those add up to the text equivalent of at least another 50 books–the SF magazines alone are about 18 book-equivalents.

Last year’s minimum goal was three books for each LPL borrowing cycle, which comes out to 42. So I at least achieved the minimum. This year’s minimum goal is the same.

I used the line”Rehearsals for retirement” (modified to say [semi-]retirement and with credit to Phil Ochs) in a Bibs & Blather essay a little while ago…well, OK, actually it was more than three years ago, in the June 2010 Cites & Insights.

This post isn’t another in that extremely intermittent series. Or maybe, in a way, it is.

Background

While I’ve never been on the speaking circuit–quite deliberately–I have done a reasonable number of speeches and perhaps an unreasonable number of keynotes in the past. Without including the same speech (or what was billed as the same speech) given more than once (which has happened three or four times, always by request), it appears that I’ve done 129 speeches, including 39 keynotes. Of those 129 speeches, 115 (89%) were invited.

Clarification: I’d regard the speaking circuit as involving at least one of three elements and probably at least two: Submitting proposals to speak, which I’ve only done once (and that by request of a publisher); Being willing to speak as often as the arrangements are feasible (there were at least two years in which I turned down invitations because I’d hit the eight-trips-a-year limit I’d set for myself); Giving the same–or essentially the same–speech on several occasions (which, as noted, has happened only three or four times).

I’m not putting down any of those practices. They just haven’t been what I’ve done.

If you’re curious, the peak came in 1996, with 13 speeches (all invited), although I was at my self-imposed trip limit in 1993 and 1995 through 1998.

I’ve spoken on a wide range of topics. I’ve had the fortune to speak at and attend state library conferences in roughly half* the states (which is always a pleasure), and I’ve spoken in two Canadian provinces and twice in Australia. (“And attend”: My practice was and is to attend as much of the conference as possible.)

I’ve almost always enjoyed it–I can remember three bad experiences, which is a pretty decent record. (That’s my bad experiences; I can’t say how audiences felt, but I’d guess I had reasonably good word of mouth in the 1990s, given that I had more invitations after I was LITA VP/President/Past-president than before or during that period.)

The three bad experiences: Once I came down with food poisoning on the first day of a conference and spoke the second day, unexpectedly facing very bright TV-filming lights. I was babbling for the first five minutes. I know: They sent me the video. Another time I flew down to Southern California, a one-day trip, to do a luncheon speech, where my primary requirement had been “a podium or table for my notes.” There was none, so I was holding notes in one hand while trying to speak. I honestly should have walked out. The third time was a combination of a speaking format I didn’t care for and felt was more of a stunt than an informative event and loads of hassles in arrangements before and during the conference. In any case, three out of 129 is pretty good. I won’t even attempt to name the best experiences, although VALA, PUBRAISS, OLA (Ontario), BCLA, TxLA and AkLA (and WisLA and WaLA and several MLAs and…) are among the many highlights.

All of which is prelude.

Foreground

I was just updating my vita, speaking notes and primary web page–the vita because it gets outdated easily, the other two because why not? {Caution: The vita is a 29-page PDF. Sorry about that.]

And thinking about whether I want to speak in the future.

The answer is yes. And no.

Yes

• I love state library conferences and library conferences in general (with one exception, and it notably doesn’t have “library” in the name).
• While I’m an introvert, I’m not antisocial, and I enjoy going to other programs and (within reason) social events at conferences.
• I believe I still have things to say that are worth hearing–otherwise, I wouldn’t still be writing books.
• We haven’t been traveling lately, so it’s a way to travel.
• If your association concludes that I can offer perspectives that you wouldn’t otherwise get, I’d be delighted to discuss a possible speech.

Maybe not

• There’s a lot to be said for hearing from people who are actually out there doing things.
• There’s a lot to be said for hearing from younger librarians and library professionals. (Of course, when compared to me 90% or more of the field is younger, but there’s also a lot to be said for hearing from librarians and library professionals in their late 20s, 30s and early 40s, as well as for the more experienced folks who aren’t yet at retirement age.)
• There’s a lot to be said–for some conferences–for hearing from a more diverse set of speakers, including hearing from more of the outstanding women in the field.
• There’s a lot to be said for hearing from people who haven’t been heard from as often.
• If you feel high-powered PowerPoint/Prezi presentations are essential, I’m not your speaker.
• If you want absolute assurance about the future or punditry of a high order, I’m not your speaker.
• If you want to be dazzled with infographics, you probably already know I’m not your speaker.

Conclusion

If there are groups who really do want to hear from me, and the arrangements make sense, I’m still interested.

And if there aren’t, that’s OK too. If I had to choose between Walt Crawford and [Jenica Rogers|Dorothea Salo|Jon Dupuis|Meredith Farkas|Laura Crossett|…] on a topic or for a situation either of them could handle well, I know which way I’d go.

*Added a bit later on October 11: I added a comment on the Friendfeed automatic posting of the title of this post, namely “Or “Why I might never be at NjLA–the most populous state I haven’t spoken in–and that’s OK.” To which Joe Kraus responded “NJ is not OK, not even close geographically”–which is very clever. Except that it led me to check the states I have and haven’t spoken in, and it turns out OK is close to NJ in one respect: It’s the next-most-populous state I haven’t spoken in [yet]. It appears that I’ve spoken in 29 of the 50 states and DC, including all but three states with at least three million people (Iowa’s the third).

Here I am on ScienceBlogs, thanks to the loose definition of “science” that lets in “information science” and the even looser definition of “information science” that includes whatever it is I do.
And yesterday I found myself wondering whether I had any business being here–although the thought was more along the lines of “Holy cr*p! What’s going on here?” The situation had nothing to do with this blog–and a lot, I think, to do with culture clashes along the lines of that half-century-old notion of the Two Cultures.

The trigger

The trigger was a cluster of conversations taking place on FriendFeed and in blogs, some of them on this platform. It had to do with the propriety of liveblogging talks during a conference, talks not explicitly labeled as secret or closed. And after reading some of the conversations, I realized that, for all my decades as a systems analyst/programmer, I’m on the “humanities side” of this particular gulf.

The odd thing is that I’m not a big fan of liveblogging as a technique, for a couple of reasons:

• As explored at length in “Speaking and attention: It all depends,” as a speaker, I used to have trouble with the idea of inattention–that, between backchannels, liveblogging, twittering, etc., the people in the audience weren’t really there fully.
• Also as a speaker, I felt–and feel–that liveblogging and twittering tend to force speeches into a bullet-point mode: If a speaker wishes to build to a point using narrative means (“tell a story”), these bits-and-pieces techniques will work against effectiveness.
• As a writer who frequently comments on what others have said, I encountered the dark side of liveblogging and conference reporting in general: Namely, what happens if you disagree with anything that’s reported. (If you’re high-fiving and saying “Wow, so-and-so made a great point,” all is well.) To wit, and particularly if the speaker is in one of the charmed circles, you get hit with some combination of “They never said that,” “You’re taking it out of context” and “That wasn’t what they meant at all.” (“Hit with” is the appropriate phrase.) After a couple of incidents, I came to a decision: I’d treat all conference reports, but specifically liveblogs and twitter streams, as fictional–I might note them, but would never, ever comment on them or believe they necessarily had anything to do with what was actually said (or meant).

But that’s a far cry from saying that liveblogging is either inappropriate or borderline unethical. I might say “I wish you’d listen for five minutes before you start tapping away–and by the way, feel free to leave if I’m not getting through to you,” but I would never say people were wrong to liveblog (or engage in backchannel chatter, which may or may not have anything to do with the actual speech).

The gulf?

The more I followed this particular controversy, the more I realized that “conference” in my context meant something very different than “conference” in the science context, at least as these scientists were using it.
Maybe–maybe–conferences-as-in-science, or at least some of them, can reasonably assume that, although anyone who registers can listen to a speech and, presumably, take notes on it and circulate those notes to friends & colleagues, that doesn’t make the contents of the speech public–that it’s reasonable to tell not only professional journalists but everyone that they shouldn’t reveal what was going on while it’s going on. (Maybe all such conferences should be held in Las Vegas, given the town’s advertising motto.)
But conferences-as-in-librarianship, at least all the ones I’ve ever attended, have had no such assumptions. On the other hand, very few speeches at those conferences involve stunning new discoveries backed by methodologically-sound research and even fewer involve any danger of being “scooped” or losing huge research grants because early information gets out too soon. As for the latter, so far I’ve encountered…well, none. People speak because they want to inform, to share ideas and winning strategies, to advocate, or because they’re On the Circuit and were invited to give Speech X to a new audience. (There are other motives, I’m sure, but sharing and informing are certainly the dominant ones.) People want what they say to reach a wider audience. Some speakers must love liveblogging, particularly those whose speeches lend themselves to the process.
Can we communicate across this gulf? Is it a real gulf, or is it edge cases? People like John D. and Christina P. convince me that the answer to the first question is yes, at least for some of us. The second one? Who knows?

Inconclusion

I don’t have a conclusion. There are culture clashes of sorts even within librarianship, to be sure, but most of the time I also see a shared culture, at least among the types of librarians most likely to be involved in the American Library Association. On the other hand, I just wrote (and then deleted) a whole set of internal “culture clashes,” many of them from (some) librarians within one specialty who (always wrongly) either treat other types of libraries/librarians as inferior or assume that all libraries are like their own specialty. And I’m fairly certain that there are many culture clashes within science, even if you leave out the social sciences.
I’ll keep trying to communicate.
Oh, and before you ask, I do at least vaguely understand entropy and the second law of thermodynamics–but thinking about or remembering that law is no more relevant to my everyday life or writing than any Shakespeare play is relevant to the everyday life of a nuclear physicist. On the other hand, when someone proposes a system that operates with 100% efficiency, a vague awareness of the second law does trigger my BS-meter…

A footnote and digression: If you want to get one of us wifty humanities types to pick up on the second law, for Gaia’s sake stay away from the Wikipedia entry! This site, though, ain’t bad: “If the first law of thermodynamics says you can’t win, then the second law of thermodynamics says you can’t even break even.” Followed by much more detail, to be sure.

Hmm. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to promote the two sessions I’ll be part of during OLA SuperConference, for Canadian readers I may have who’ll be there…

Shiny Toys or Useful Tools?

Friday, January 30, 3:45 p.m.
Session 1320

Blogs and wikis aren’t shiny new toys for libraries and librarians any more.  They’ve moved from toys to tools.  As with most tools, they’re not magic, they’re not right for everything or everybody, but they can be powerfully effective in many situations.  This talk will include a very brief introduction to the tools, some notes on when one or the other might make more sense and some cautionary  notes.  Then we’ll look at how they’re working our for libraries and librarians — some examples, but also the results of some informal study of library-related wikis and the largest studies of library blogs and blogs by library people.

Best guess at this point: That very brief introduction will take about two minutes, if that, and I’ll spend almost no time talking about wikis–there are articles at PLN on blogs, wikis and when to use which that are better than anything I’d say on the spur of the moment. I’ll devote some attention to updates on currency (and visibility) for library blogs and liblogs, based on a snapshot study done December 16-17. There are graphs–but since I travel without notebook, the graphs will appear in an article related to the talk, which will appear in the February 2009 Cites & Insights (when it appears). Lots of time for discussion.

Top Technology Trends–Balanced Libraries: Books, Bytes and Web 2.0

Saturday, January 31, 9:05 a.m.
Session #1700

What technologies and trends should you be watching? What’s the next big idea for libraries as we begin 2009? Join the experts as they discuss technologies to be aware of now and beyond. They will touch on planning, people and participation. Always one of Super Conference’s most anticipated sessions.

“The experts” in this case are Paul Takala of Hamilton PL, Anita Brooks-Kirkland of Waterloo Region DSB, and me. I’ve never met the others. We each get 20 minutes. Those of you who use PLN may already know my current “top half-dozen trends,” although the order of them has already changed slightly…and, of course, I’ll be making notes right up to the start of the session (and beyond!). Should be fun.

Otherwise…

I’ll be at nearly all of the conference, although I may head out before Saturday’s luncheon so I have plenty of time to get to the airport and have a substantial late lunch/early dinner before the long journey home. My tentative schedule’s still here. Known changes:

• I plan to attend John Dupuis’ session on Thursday morning.
• I’d guess attendance at any plenary session is at most half-likely.
• I do have dinner plans Thursday after the early reception, but no other social plans beyond the receptions noted. (I’m an early bird, which also means I’m not a night owl… And I’m guessing I won’t have a workable cell phone in Toronto.)
• Otherwise, pretty much as it says.

This all, to be sure, assumes that the path of the big storm stays as currently anticipated. (I do have a nonstop flight from SFO to Toronto, to be sure.)