Month: July 2023

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panorama photo of sunrise over the crater at Haleakala

“Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.”

Pierre de Ronsard (Sonnets pour Hélène bk. 1 no .43, 1578)

I just returned from a weeklong vacation. Not a staycation. Not a planned adventure. A real do-nothing, plan-nothing, expect-nothing vacation where, with the exception of one personal excursion and two family dinner reservations, I had no plans each day other than to “figure it out when I wake up.” It’s the first such vacation I’ve taken in… well, ever. Every extended trip in the past decade has been planned to the bone: London, Northern California, Prague, France. Each of these had a detailed itinerary; and gods damn it everyone was going to follow it!

Not this time.

This time I went to Maui. And I did nothing. I did nothing for days. With the exception of the aforementioned excursion (to see the sun rise over Haleakalā) and the two family dinners (made at others’ requests), each day was its own discovery. 

Coming back from a vacation of this magnitude (in detachment, not length) would take some getting used to. I deleted Teams from my phone before I left. I’ve never had email on my phone so that connection was already severed. I didn’t bring a laptop or tablet device. I told my team they could contact me, but only if it was worth a phone call (which was essentially the same as saying don’t). So I knew when I returned I would be coming back as if I had completely jumped off the prime timeline.

I’ve long exorcised the Sunday scaries from my life (with the help of a therapist), but I had the Sunday scaries this time. It took an inordinent amount of willpower not to start “cleaning up my email” the day before. I had to remind myself that work never ends, and that “getting a head start” isn’t possible when there is no finish line. I let it go. So here is some additional advice on how I managed to successfully re-enter the office after an extended vacation.

  1. Create a buffer. Before you leave, block off the day you return to the office on your calendar. Don’t schedule or plan any meetings. Make sure your shared calendar shows you as “busy” so folks don’t put a meeting there while you’re away.
  2. Manage expectations. While you’re at it, set an away message that essentially says “Don’t email me now.” My message this time was as follows: “I am out of the office on holiday until Tuesday, July 18. If you need a response from me, please email me after that date. (I will not have access to email while I’m away and I will not be able to “catch up” on email when I return.) For general library inquiries, you can contact…” (One day, I hope it becomes company policy/culture to block emails when someone is on vacation).
  3. Ask a friend. Before jumping into email, ask your team “What did I miss that I should pay attention to first?” Your colleagues, especially if you have a good rapport, will know what matters most to you.
  4. Speed clean. Once you do start processing things, process all the easy messages first: the ones that don’t require a response, the junk mail, the requests you will pretend you never saw. Get those out of the way if for anything to reduce the unread count on your inbox folder.
  5. Be kind to yourself. Take frequent breaks throughout the day. Take a walk around the office. Try to find at least one thing that’s changed since you left.
  6. Monotask. For the stickier action items, tackle them one at a time. Some of your responses may be “I’ll get back to you on this” and that still counts.
  7. Don’t apologize. Don’t say sorry for being away or not replying sooner. You don’t owe someone who ignored your away message (see #2) an apology.

Your mileage may vary, but by the end of the week I was fully back on track. No more Sunday scaries.

What I’m reading

Who Killed Google Reader by David Pierce

“Reader was probably never going to become the world-conquering beast Facebook eventually became, but the team felt it had figured out some things about how people actually want to connect.” 

You Are Not the Answer by Benjamin at Thinkings Space

“Simply put, the modern workplace is not structured to value or respect individuals. Individuals are useful to a company only to a point.”

Life Before Cellphones by Dan Lois

“The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people, who never let their cellphones leave their hands. Yes, it’s because they’re addicted, but it’s also because we’re all expected by bosses, co-workers, and friends to be online and available pretty much every time of day.” 

News from the garden

rat carrying an apple up a wooden pole

My daughter sent me this photo during work. After a three year hiatus, the fruit rats are back. This one managed to eventually carry the apple over the fence into the neighboring yard. Enjoy, my friend. But you better stay away from my corn.

Links to the past

Overheard online

“Librarians are on the front lines, fighting every day to make the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas available to everyone.”

President Barack Obama on Twitter.

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crowd of librarians sitting in conference hall at ALA annual 2018

“I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.”

John Wanamaker, Quoted in Bible Conference, Winona Echos (1919)

It’s been 5 years since I attended an ALA Annual Conference. My interest in this yearly gathering of librarians from around the country has waned considerably in the last half-century as I’ve become more and more entrenched in the work of my own institution. That’s a story for another post. What I wanted to briefly talk about today was one aspect of ALA Annual that I miss: the PR Xchange Awards and the John Cotton Dana Awards. Both of these awards celebrate excellence in library communications efforts. The JCDs focus primarily on strategic communication and public relations, while the PRX celebrate singular promotional items. 

This year’s award winners highlight a few academic library projects. The University of Colorado Boulder Libraries’ “Culture Crawl” is a collaboration between eleven cultural and heritage organizations to highlight library spaces, services, exhibits, and local museums. It was the only college/university to win a JCD this year. The PRX awards had a much better showing from the academic side: Montana State University, Washington University, and James Madison to name just a few. 

While I love that these two awards bring attention to academic libraries producing remarkable content, I would love to see a separate award for excellent marketing, communications, and strategic outreach (and/or programming) for higher ed libraries. The needs of our communities and the best practices for reaching them differ just enough from our colleagues in public libraries to merit our own arena. Our audiences are captive and demographically narrower than the general population. Moreover, our ultimate ends lean more towards the specific (i.e., supporting graduation and retention) rather than the general (e.g., lifelong learning). Outreach to students, faculty, and staff is a different beast altogether than outreach to a local community. 

In developing a new award, the intent and structure of the ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries Award (currently on hiatus) is a good place to start: how does communications and outreach connect with your library’s strategic mission and the mission of the college/university? Are you connecting the dots between (1) the skills, collections, and services that libraries provide; (2) our professional ethics; and (3) the goals of the housing institution? Outreach and communications success could be measured quantitatively or qualitatively, but would needs go beyond gate counts and feedback forms. 

All that said, perhaps a separate award isn’t necessary. I do enjoy seeing the wide variety of materials showcased by both the JCDs and the PRX. Either of those awards could create separate categories based on library types. I think what I want most of all is simply to see more academic library external commutations work. I know folks are out there creating remarkable content: let’s see it and celebrate it!

What I’m reading

Toward a Leisure Ethic by Stuart Whatley

“Every fleeting moment of our spare time is surrendered to the superficial offerings of the attention economy, all of it designed for addiction, the goal being to monetize people’s experiences rather than create meaningful ones. […] Many have extolled a leisure ethic, and none would say that time well spent lies in ambitious careerism or in drifting on a sea of addictive content. Most would agree that flourishing in time consists of free, active, thoughtful engagement with the world in accordance with one’s nature.”

The Ambitious Plan to Open Up a Treasure Trove of Black History by Erin Migdol

“The archive contains around 5,000 magazines, 200 boxes of business records, 10,000 audio and visual recordings, and 4.5 million prints and negatives that chronicle Black life from the 1940s until the present day.”

Writing for the Bad Faith Reader by Susie Dumond

“Not every book is for every reader.” Good advice for anyone creating art.

News from the garden

vegetable garden with squash vines, beans, and corn

The vegetable beds are [finally] in full swing. The vine in the foreground is butternut squash. And look! The corn made it knee-high before the Fourth of July! There are also tomatoes, peppers, and beans to be excited about. 

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. “We give far too much weight to Twitter’s impact on social and political life and “the public square.” Collectively, we overestimate its influence, obsessing to an unreasonable degree over how it will react to our content, knowing full well that any storm we create today will be subsumed by next week’s hurricane of rage.”
  • 6 years ago: Life, uh, finds a way. Actually, now I would be OK with that.
  • 10 years ago: On ukulele calluses.

Overheard online

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