What have you learned about RADS through your social media project? How has this project challenged you?
I have a hard time deciding if RADS is a place where the process itself is a product (in addition to the tangible product of a processed library item). If it is, I’m not so sure I captured that in my weekly posts. The compartmentalizing that the social media project demanded was helpful in keeping weeks from blending but perhaps that framed things as more discontinuous than they are in reality. In this, I hope not to have fragmented the unseen yet organic solidarity of RADS for those on the outside looking in. By this I mean misrepresented the RADS department as a collection of independent silos that have little cross-pollination.
The concern of appropriate representation proved unabating even as I grew more comfortable attaching my name to the posts I drafted. My choice of words, as this blog post might hint at, is not always of marketable quality. Concision and business friendly/conscious language were things I had to work on imitating. It was challenging at times to vet the things I thought good to share, especially when it came to anything related to finances. My immediate inclination, in this and other things, has been to be as transparent as possible. Other areas that were hard to communicate were more in the ballpark of insider baseball. As a recent example, I wanted to talk about some of the particularities of MARC (I included the display source in my post), but realized that folks might not care too much about the mechanics of a system that they will likely never pop the hood of.
Putting aside my hesitations, worries, and regrets about how I did in interfacing with the public (insofar as you can call that one-way street interfacing), I appreciate the project for letting me openly reflect and think aloud to an audience that was wanting to be delighted and enlightened. The challenging bits were head-tilting and disagreeable, but they were also rich sites of learning and growth. I am grateful to have had this project scaffolded (so seamlessly might I add) to the RADS curriculum!
What are some strengths you have gained during your work this term? How do you think your work this term will inform the work you do for the rest of the year?
Without paying too much heed to everything else that happened this term, I reckon I’ve gotten better, if at least marginally so, at being present and focused when called upon. This was an area that I worried about, particularly when I saw the length of some of my meetings with RADS librarians. I greatly enjoyed the conversations I got to have with everyone, and I hope that my questions and comments were received well.
Another key point of development has been in the fostering of a critical spirit towards the politics of knowledge (synonymous perhaps and probably better recognized in this sphere as information sciences?). I know I voiced my misconceptions early on about just how much I – and by extension other unaware library users – took for granted in a library. By this I mean the labor and dedicated intentionality that goes into acquiring, processing, and “developing” books. Conceptions of accessibility, preservation, and general library practice were shaken, enhanced, and reformed every week as I encountered the rationale and methods of things I never spared a second thought to.
I strongly hope that my appreciation for all the work done by RADS staff informs my understanding of the scale for all other areas of library work. That the connections both personal and conceptual persist and anastomose into the different branches of the Libe.
But that is all for the future, isn’t it? I still have winter break RADS work to enjoy and savor 🙂