Liminality Rules

I'm leaving Al Ain in an hour and heading for Dubai before going to the airport.  This has been such an eye opening experience for me and spending the last day with Mr. Ali and the staff at the Zayed library was so nice.  I got to say goodbye to the people I have met and meet some new ones.  I sat with their Collection Development Librarian at the Reference desk and he
showed me the mapping that he was doing, mapping the curricula to the collections.  I met the man who is their binder and he smiled when I said, "look at all that buckram."  They have a binding machine in the library and the bound volumes look beautiful.

The ladies decided that I would eat traditional food with them at lunch (women and men do not eat together) and yet once again, I enjoyed everything and once again, they fed me generously.  I learned about the different bread, this really yummy mixture that looks like refried beans but is really made from wheat and has meat in it.  And then came the desserts.  I'm astounded that every one isn't obese here.  It must be the heat! 

In the morning Hadat, my driver who delivers me promptly right where I need to be, took me to the Al Ain Museum and then we went to the Al Ain Mall.  When I first walked in, I saw the skating rink with a group of what looked to be about 3rd grade girls happily skating away.  We did a tiny bit of shopping...most of the stores in the mall are stores that we have in our malls and the food court looked totally American....KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Baskin and Robbins, Dunkin Donut.  We buy oil, they buy fast food.

It is mind boggling to think that 40 years ago, this country didn't exist.  Seven emirates came together as a federation because one man saw what the future could bring.

I'm very ready to come home and I have thoroughly enjoyed this experience.  I'm a wiser person for it.

Today was the second day of a three day workshop that I'm giving here for the staff of the UAEU Libraries.  On the first day, I had a comprehensive plan and a timetable in very small increments of time (thank you Barbara Sherlock for the example).  After the first day, I asked the participants what they would like me to talk about the second day so last night I went back to the hotel and worked for about 7 hours to prepare for today.  On the first day we talked all about collections assessment and my goal is for the staff here to be able to create an assessment plan by themselves so that they have great data with which to make their budget proposal to the campus.  I was asked to be very specific so last night I worked on what data to gather in order to tell the story they want to tell and where exactly to get that data.  One of the ladies also asked me if I could talk about weeding the collection so we talked about that today.  We also discussed how to get the best books possible with a very small book budget.

Before we broke for lunch, the Acquisitions staff asked me if I could talk about my experience working in Acquistions.  I hadn't thought about it for awhile, but I worked in Acquisitions for twenty-one years in three universities in positions as diverse as a serials check in assistant to head of the department.  I loved most every day in the acquisitions department and they asked me what my biggest challenge was and they shared theirs.  It wasn't very different.

At the end of the day, I spent some time sitting with their eresources librarian while he showed me their Summon implementation.  I talked to Moza at the end of the day.  She's very pleased that it is going well because of course, it's not just a reflection on me, but on her too for bringing me here from halfway across the world.  I should have considered that before but I didn't.  I'm very pleased that it is going well too. I've learned a couple of things.  First, the most important thing is for participants in a workshop to feel comfortable with you and you with them.  If they don't, it's not going to flow nicely.  Also, you have to be flexible.  Listen to their questions and adapt your schedule to theirs.  That's working well too though you have to be prepared to do a lot of work in the evenings between sessions.  Finally, give them your very best work.  Wherever you go, you're an ambassador not just for yourself, but for your university and in this case, for your country.  We joked that it was like a UN at breaktime today.  People work here who were born in the UAE but also in Egypt, Somalia, Jordan, and other places that I don't know.  Getting to meet individuals makes you realize how similar people can be.

Tomorrow is my last official "work day" and then on Thursday, I'm going to the National Museum and then heading to Dubai to come home.  This has been a wonderful experience and I'm grateful to the young woman who gave me this opportunity.  How she found me, I don't know, but I'm glad that she did.

 I confess that I was very nervous this morning.  This was the first day of a three day workshop.  What if I didn't have enough to say?  What if they didn't ask questions?  What if they got bored and started looking at their phones?  What if I couldn't answer their questions?  I'm sure everyone who teaches goes through some form of this internal drama.

And it was fine.  They were very engaged all morning long asked great questions, and I was able to answer!  This is a workshop on collections assessment and stretching your collections dollars so this is something that I've been talking about, writing about, or something that we're tackling here at Penn State. 

I almost had a disaster though.  I was so pleased that the morning went well that I left for the hotel from the library without my purse.  I left that in the seminar room and it had my passport, ID, money, and hotel key in it.  I asked the driver to return to the University because I knew I couldn't wait for an hour without knowing.  I happened to be riding in the car with one of the staff who was delivering books to another university.  She was so gracious and kind.  She is from Yemen and she's lived in the UAE for many years.  Each year she goes back to see her family but this year, she might not be able to return.  She kindly called back to the library and asked them to look for my purse.  Sure enough, it was there, and a possible disaster was avoided. I learned my lesson: keep the purse in the bag with the papers!

In the afternoon we got down to some very specific details.  Only they know what story they want to tell and what they want to do with the data.  I made some very specific suggestions which they liked and tomorrow I will make sure they know exactly where they can get the data.  They use the III Millenium ILS an I remember enough of that even now.  It's unfortunately that I know more about that system and Voyager than I do Sirsi but I've decided that's a function of my position (our AULs at UIUC didn't know how to use the ILS well either) and the fact that the Head of Acquisitions just makes it his/her business how to use the system and to be able to create the correct reports.  They also have access to the Journal Citation Reports so I gave an abbreviated session on how that works and how we can use it in Libraries.  By the end of the day I was pooped, and I was so glad when Moza came in and said that she had heard people were very pleased.  One of the best things about teaching? Immediate feedback.  Of course, now I'm worried that Day 2 won't go as well as Day 1! Tonight I'm coming back and creating material for tomorrow.  I'm just taking one day at a time and trying to respond to what they state their goals are for the next day.  Many thanks to folks like Becky and Ellysa who have given me tutoring on teaching.

Yesterday Moza and I talked a bit about her culture.  One of their core values is to be kind and not inflict pain on others.  If you hurt someone, you hurt them and yourself and their pain becomes your pain.  I've been thinking about that a lot in the past day.  We sometimes have a tendency to group people together, to stereotype, and not view people as individuals.  What I can say is that each person I have met has been kind and thoughtful.

Finally, I saw rows and rows of date trees today.  They aren't ready for harvest yet, but they will be this summer.  I'll never look at the dates I buy in the store in the same way again.

This week I am in Al Ain in the emirate of Abu Dhabi to facilitate a workshop on collections analysis and how to get the most efficiencies from your library collections budget.  This is an experience of a lifetime and I have a feeling that the staff of the library are going to teach me much more than I teach them.

I left State College at 7:30pm on Friday evening, flew to Dulles and then shortly, it was on to Dubai.  It is about a 13 hour flight and I was appreciative of the fact that I could sleep for awhile (until Rome on the little airplane map) and also for the American from Colorado Springs that sat next to me and gave me some tips on the culture.  He works for a company he wouldn't name that is trying to win a defense contract and it was his third trip here.  Going through customs was easy and everyone was unfailingly polite.  I got out of the airport and just as Moza said, there was a man holding up a "Lisa German" sign who was hired to drive me from Dubai to Al Ain, the home of the United Arab Emirates University.  Everything was fine until I got to the hotel and they said they had no booking.  By this time it's almost 11pm and I'm very sleepy.  Thankfully Moza was awake and called the booking agent, and all was fine and I got to my room.

After a fitful sleep, I worked on my presentation and went over to the library to meet Moza. The workweek is Sunday through Thursday here.  It was lovely to meet her and the Deanship (a historian not a librarian).  We took a tour of the very new library and checked out the room for tomorrow.

Now it's back to work more on my presentation for the next three days.  I think Thursday will yield a trip to Dubai before I head home Friday morning.  Right now, I'm just taking in the wonderful food, unbelievable heat, and pleasantness and kindness of everyone I've met.

     Last Friday, Jeff Trzeciak, University Librarian at McMaster University in Canada, came to Penn State to give a talk which was sponsored by our Colloquia Committee.  FYI, the purpose of the Libraries' Colloquia Committee is "to organize an annual series of lectures or seminars on topics that encourage dialogue about the issues, trends, and developments in librarianship and higher education."  His talk was called, "Transforming Traditional Libraries." When we asked Jeff to talk, we asked him to be provocative, and he was, so thanks, Jeff, for engendering great discussion both at Penn State and beyond.

In an excellent discussion that morning with some of our subject library heads and our Content Stewardship Council, Jeff talked about the changes that he's made at MacMaster.  Everything he's done has been done for the students and faculty.  He's created better spaces in the library for the students. Librarians and staff have been redeployed to where they're most needed, according to their student-centered strategies.  He's also brought in CLIR fellows to work on specific projects and they're doing excellent work.  I'm not surprised because all the CLIR fellows I've met have been terrific.   22,000 students daily use the MacMaster Libraries out of a 25,000 student population.  Hearing that made me want to go and check our numbers!

     He also talked about the need for LIS educators to listen to the needs of pracitioners.  I might be putting words in his mouth, but that was how I interpreted his comments. 

     But we also need skills from other professions.  We need project managers (I heard that today in a meeting from a librarian) and we need technologists.  Our colleagues in Digital Library Technologies, Teaching and Learning with Technologies, and in other technology units at Penn State are terrific.  They are our partners. For example, our Curation Architecture Prototype Services Team is doing some transformative work developing  "a prototype service-oriented architecture consisting of a web application for ingest and management of digital objects and a service platform providing atomistic curation functions (microservices)"  Around the table on that team are a digital collections curator (a librarian and a former CLIR fellow), a digital library architect (a technologist and a librarian), a developer, a metadata librarian, a project manager, and a librarian from Special Collections.  Each of them brought a wealth of skills to the table and the solutions outlined in their report substantiate the importance of having people who have all types of skills sets to provide services to students and faculty in the 21^st century and I think that's what Jeff was talking about in his talk on Friday. 

     I believe that libraries need a variety of people with diverse skill sets in order to meet the needs of students and faculty.  We are strong advocates of diversity at the Penn State University Libraries and that has many meanings.  It means we respect our colleagues, respect differences of opinion, and respect the idea that a diverse library staff makes us stronger.  We work in academia where we're supposed to be searching for answers, valuing diverse opinions, and where my solutions aren't necessarily your solutions. 

     Jeff, thanks for sparking such a great discussion and giving us a lot to think about.

I started writing this blog almost four years ago. I've been a very irregular poster, sometimes going for months at a time between posting. I wrote in my very first post:

" According to Wikipedia, "the liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition, during which your normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to something new."

I'm not too happy with this definition because I view liminality as that state in between.  It's the time period after high school graduation and before college or an engagement period, or the time in between jobs.  It's that middle state between an ending of one thing and the beginning of another.

Starting in July, my responsibilities are going to change.  I decided last week that I would blog about the transition, especially since I had such a perfectly named blog for this particular set of postings.  I was all ready to start posting and then higher education in PA got devastating preliminary budget news and I got sidetracked.  However, as much as I might like, I can't control what happens in Harrisburg, but I can control my reaction to it, so I decided to get back on my originally planned course.  So over the next few weeks/months, I'm going to blog about this transition and share with you my plans, thoughts, and experiences.

Next up:  What I'm going to be doing

I spent time this spring blogging about things in my personal life and now it's time to turn my attention to the stuff I'm paid to do.  I have to say, I love blogging.  I write best in 500 word chunks so blog writing is great.  I have accomplished something in 20 minutes.

I'm at the Research Library Group meeting this week. RLG, if you remember, was a separate entity for years until almost 5 years ago, it merged with OCLC (I've written an article about the history of bibliographic utilities for the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science if you want to read more.)  It's turned into OCLC Research and they do a lot of research that research libraries care about.  At all of these types of things, you have to pick and choose what you listen to...I actually hate that about conferences.  I want to hear everything if MPOW is paying me to attend.  So I made choices to hear about the special collections activities in research libraries yesterday.  Jackie Dooley did the library world a great service by putting together a survey which looked at library special collections activities. She asked "what are your greatest challenges" and it was interesting to hear that space, born digital materials, and digitization were the biggest challenges facing special collections units.  Since we're grappling with the born digital issues in our library, I can empathize with those that answered that acquiring, processing, accessing, preserving born digital materials is a challenge. I also was surprised to learn that all but 38% of the respondents loan their original rare books.
The study concluded several things, one of which was to " design and implement collaborative projects to decrease backlogs of cartographic and audio visual materials." I recommend that we pay close attention to their findings which should be released very soon.

I learn so much by talking with my colleagues.  Several of us had dinner last night. We discussed issues big and small. Since all of us are AUL's or AD's, we venture into the clouds with our discussions and then also down to the ground (are you happy with the service you're getting from vendor X?)  There is a woman here who worked in acquisitions with me at Illinois before we were librarians.  We both went to library school, got our MLS's, and became librarians.  Now we meet at conferences and catch up on how are lives are going.  We were both pregnant 25 years ago so it's fun to talk about our daughters because we shared that experience.  My advice to anyone -- never burn your bridges. 

Today is day 2...some of the sessions are available via webcat.  A search on rlg meeting 2010 should get you to the agenda.

My brother Doug passed away on Sunday morning.  Doug was born with Cystic Fibrosis and when he was an infant, we were told that he probably wouldn't live past 7.  Well, he did. At 38, he was really sick and his lungs were failing and miraculously, a set of lungs became available and he got another chance with his lung transplant.  He had about 6 and a half good years with those wonderful lungs and then he was diagnosed in November with colon cancer that had already spread to his liver.  His body finally gave out on Sunday morning about 6:30 with the sun shining through the windows of his hospital room. Dana and I were with him.

Doug was an amazing boy, then man.  I'm so glad I was his older sister because I remember every stage of his life and had the fortune of both being a part of, and being an observer of, his childhood, teen years and adulthood.

He really was made whole when he married Dana, his wife of the last 15 years.  They were soul mates who loved each other deeply and nurtured and took care of each other. 

Doug was an avid reader (he was abd in Philosophy) and spent his life  searching for answers. He had just found Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, whose letters he enjoyed reading and whose writings he pondered. 

In the last week of his life, and I'm convinced he knew it was his last week, he sent me James Joyce's Dubliner's.  In it he wrote, "Lisa, books are life long friends.  I hope this book becomes one of your friends as it reminds you of your trip to Ireland."

Peace be with you, dear brother. 

We had one last day in Dublin and had so much to see, we made up a schedule the night before.  It took a bit of pre-planning to get to everywhere we wanted to go.  Our list included the National Museum, National Library, Chester Beatty Museum, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Marsh Library, The Irish Writer's Museum, and the James Joyce Center.  We also wanted a bit of last day shopping in the middle and take the last day to drink some more yummy Irish beer. We walked through St. Stephen's Green and started out at the National Museum where we saw Ireland antiquities preserved in the peat and beautiful Irish gold jewelry, as well as remnants from Viking and medieval times.  The coolest thing was a long (log) boat 60 ft long.  After that we walked into the National Library and up to the Reading Room which has green lights on the tables, just like at Penn State's Paterno Reading Room.  After that we did a bit of shopping and headed off to the Chester Beatty Museum where they're having an exhibit (very nicely done) on ancient China and a look at their permanent collection of religious displays from religions around the world.  We decided to then head up to St. Patrick's and the Marsh Library, but we arrived just as the Marsh was closing for the day.  So we went into St. Patrick's and lo and behold, there was a concert by a young people's choir from the UK going on.  We sat and listened for awhile, transfixed by the loveliness of their voices and the fantastic acoustics at St. Patrick's. 

After that, we started making our way to lunch and to the general vicinity of the Writer's Museum.  Dublin is separated to the North and South by the River Liffey .  We were in the south during the morning and headed north for the afternoon.  We shared some fish and chips, had a beer, and then walked down O'Connell St. towards the Writer's Museum.  Dublin has a rich heritage of writers such as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Sheridan, W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Synge.  We took a grand audio tour which left us both wanting to go back and read and read.  On our way to the writer's museum, we walked by a march supporting the abolishment of racism.  The week before a 15 year old boy, star soccer player, was killed by two men in what was a senseless act of violence.  We sat on a rock and watched as people of all races passed by.   After the writer's museum we made a quick stop at The James Joyce Center is quite small but has some interesting memorabilia. 

We headed back towards the south end of town for one last and a stop at the Stag's Head and a stroll through Trinity College.  We also visited Merrion Square and the Oscar Wilde statue, just before closing.  Merrion Square is a very green, beautiful park surrounded by relatively stark Georgian buildings.  We were looking for Toners, and a bite to eat and a beer.  We had a great meal of duck pate and smoked salmon salad and then headed back to the room via St. Stephen's Green. 

This was a marvelous trip for two reasons - because Ireland is beautiful, and because Lauri and I got to spend time together.  She's such a wonderful traveling companion...highly organized and patient with my, "can you repeat that?" or "are you sure we're going in the right direction?" questions.  She made tea for us each morning, and walked slower to keep up with my shorter gait...not to mention being a wonderful woman and great pub crawler.  We thank Mairéad for her helpfulness as we were choosing places to go. Now as we read books about Ireland or by Irish authors, we'll have a context and appreciation for the complexity of the Irish heritage and culture, and for the beauty of Ireland.