Tag Archives: technology

Erasing Technical Labor in Technical Services

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Last Friday, July 26th, was #sysadminday, or System Administrator Appreciation Day. Taking place on the last Friday of July every year, this pseudo-holiday initially started as a celebration of the system administrator but has grown to celebrate all IT workers. It is a day for celebrations, computer-themed cakes, and old war stories. It’s also an excuse for me to share my favorite IT horror picture.

#sysadminday is not as widely celebrated in libraries as you find in other places of work, but the work done by IT and other technology workers doesn’t differ all that greatly from other IT and technology work done elsewhere. This is where our story begins.

Someone posted a happy #sysadminday message on the Troublesome Cataloger and Magical Metadata Fairies FB group and a small discussion started about what exactly a sysadmin is and does. I chimed in with a library-centric example that a sysadmin might do – keep the ILS up and going. It’s not all that uncommon for library IT sysadmins to keep systems like the ILS going. It’s also not all that uncommon for your systems librarian who is officially responsible for the ILS to be the unofficial sysadmin of the library. The discussion moves on with more small talk.

But we soon found out that Someone Was Wrong On The Internet, and that someone was me. The screenshot of the exchange is below. The parent comment was deleted soon after my responses, so only the screenshot was left. I crossed out the names to protect the innocent and the guilty.

Screenshot of a FB comment thread, with names blocked out except for Becky. The comment thread contains someone mansplaining what a true sysadmin is, and a rebuttal from Becky.

[For those who don’t want to read the alt-text, the main comment in question is this: “That’s not the kind of sysadmin they’re talking about for sysadmin day. For sysadmin day, they’re talking about the IT sysadmins who keep all the computers (especially the servers) running (and backed up and upgraded and so on).” A link to the wikipedia page for sysadminday follows.]

At first, I chalked this little episode to a textbook example of mansplaining.

A white man in the foreground speaks, with the text "mansplaining" next to his mouth. A white woman leans in from the background giving a look of disbelief of what the man just said.
Janeway’s reaction is mild, to say the least.

However, after some reflection, the comment is more serious than just your generic mansplain. This comment erases the labor of many in the realms of library Technical Services and Systems departments.

Let’s break this down and get into some of the details as to why this is:

How does this comment erase labor?

The comment in question restricts the system administrator day to a particular type of IT professional, the system administrator. This ignores several realities:

  • #sysadminday celebrates all IT workers, as documented in various resources and practiced in the real world.
  • For those who have IT departments, IT staff are usually in the position of working in multiple areas due to limited resources. Sysadmin duties are more likely to be everyone’s duties in IT.
  • For those who do not have Library IT departments, sysadmin duties are spread out to those who have the skills. This happens at smaller or more resource-limited libraries. These folks might come from Technical Services as well as Public Services.

To gatekeep #sysadminday to only a person who is a dedicated system administrator in an IT department that can afford to have a dedicated sysadmin removes all others who do sysadmin duties from the picture of recognition.

Whose labor did it erase?

It erases any IT-related labor performed by staff who are not in traditional IT departments. This can include folks in both Public and Technical Services, as well as folks who work in Library IT within an organization that has an organizational IT department. Those library staff perform IT duties for a variety of reasons:

  • Organizational IT does not know how to deal with certain types of servers/infrastructure
    • For example, Organizational IT might be a Microsoft shop, but your library needs to have Linux servers for library systems and applications
  • There is no Library IT department to speak of, and organizational IT doesn’t get Library IT needs
  • Lack of resources in organizational/library IT for additional infrastructure/systems needed in the library

While my Public Services colleagues find themselves doing IT as part of their “other duties as assigned”, my focus in this answer will be Technical Services. Technical Services staff require many complex systems and applications to keep their department, as well as the library, up and going, and this is how your Systems Librarian, or Cataloging Librarian, or other TS staff become your accidental library sysadmin.

I lived through this type of IT work in multiple libraries. I did not belong to an IT department, and in one library there was no official Library IT department to speak of. In my work in Technical Services, I kept servers patched and running, troubleshoot servers and staff computers, assisted in playing “whack-a-mole” with blacklisting IP addresses trying to screen scrape the library catalog, and replaced server parts as well as entire servers.

[The reaction from the ILS vendor rep when I hauled the old ILS server out from the server room was priceless.]

So, when someone says that a Technical Services librarian that has done sysadmin duties cannot be a sysadmin, it erases the labor of that librarian. It even erases that time where she was in the server room very early in the morning, hot-swapping a failed hard disk drive in the ILS database server, a task not uncommon to many library sysadmins.

Why do I (the reader) care if this labor is erased?

Because erasing this labor reinforces the class hierarchy in librarianship, reinforces gender stereotypes and power dynamics, and reinforces the inertia that prevents Technical Services from gaining and maintaining the resources they need for sustainability.

It serves to reinforce the notion that valuable technology work only happens if someone is in a certain department with a certain title. Particularly in Technical Services, technology work is usually invisible labor – the curse of “other duties as assigned”. This leads to TS workers to be underpaid or unpaid for the skills and duties that they are actually performing. Considering that in many places facing budget cuts or ways to reallocate resources look at Technical Services for these cuts or sources to move resources from, your existence in TS turns into a never-ending cycle of “doing more with less.”

When we look at the data collected by Library Journal in their 2017 Placements & Salaries Survey, we find that Technical Services positions are near the bottom of the list for average salaries. Catalogers and metadata staff average salaries are in the middle of the pack, but near the top of the list are your technology workers – IT, Systems technology, UX, etc. The results are similar if you sort by median salary. TS workers who do similar technology work to IT work are most likely not getting properly compensated. On the topic of compensation, in both LJ’s 2017 survey and the May 2019 AFL-CIO (DPE) Fact Sheet on Library Workers, men are consistently paid higher than the other gender that the surveys recorded, which is women.

Sadly I don’t have ready access to data about the gender ratios in library departments; however, I’m not sure if I need the numbers to state the fact that library technology roles are usually filled by cismen. It was only a few years ago when the Code4Lib annual conference attendance finally started to not be overwhelmingly cismen. Library technology mirrors general technology in several aspects. The ones better paid are the ones in technology roles, and in librarianship, you have those roles filled by cismen.

Being a woman in library IT is hard enough. I recommend reading We Can Do I.T. for a collection of recent recollections and essays about women working in library IT. But before I even took a traditional library IT role – the role of IT manager – my technology work in Technical Services faced many challenges concerning recognition. I was in a triple bind – not only I had to prove myself to others in the library technology world that a woman belonged there, but that a Technical Services librarian belonged there as well. A cataloger who codes? A TS librarian who is in charge of the feeding and caring of her ILS servers? I was in the wrong department with the wrong job title with the wrong gender.

This is why that comment by our colleague at the beginning of this post is more than just mansplaining. By erasing the technology labor performed by Technical Services workers with a comment in a public forum for Technical Services workers, the comment serves as a reminder to TS folks that their labor doesn’t count as real labor, labor that shouldn’t be properly recognized or compensated. It is to keep folks in line with their prescribed roles, dictated by those who control the role definitions.

All of this because someone suggested that the person keeping your ILS up and going should be celebrated on #sysadminday.

A mishmash of #mashcat thoughts

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There are many thoughts I want to present in this post, but the connections between the thoughts are not fully developed. Therefore, the post comes in several parts.

When I started my first post-MLIS job at Miami University, I was repeatedly told that the position I held – bibliographic systems librarian – was an unusual position in traditional technical services departments. My predecessor (an authority control librarian) essentially automated himself out of the job; he took authority control workflows and made a suite of scripts (mostly macros and server-side scripts) that made his full time job into a part time duty for a support staff member. The role I took on was essentially Technical Services Developer: split between cataloging and programming.

I inherited my predecessor’s scripts, learned the workflows that they covered, and then built new scripts based on the needs of the department. Most of the programming knowledge I have was learned at MU. As the workflows became more complex, more complex and powerful tools were needed. From my predecessor’s Macro Express and Perl scripts came an abundance of AutoIt and PHP scripts. Before I left MU, I started to build scripts using pymarc, digging through the script wizard function of MarcEdit to automate certain database maintenance projects.

My goals were many. Keystrokes saved equal more time to work on other projects. Simple decisions made by the script meant that the staff person can focus their attention on more complex decisions, ones that are not so easily scripted, at least for a novice coder. All of these technological goals needed to operate within the overarching goal of creating and maintaining access of these resources for library users. The scripts I wrote were constructed after analyzing workflows and deliberation about the level of quality that needed to be met in said workflow. We had to strike a balance between entirely system automation and manually editing everything. Once we agreed on a midpoint, a proof of concept scripting phase could begin.

In short, efficiency without sacrificing quality. Saving the time of the user as well as the staff. My purpose was to serve both the public and the staff.

When I asked about the other candidates who applied for my position, a coworker detailed the two types of candidates that made up the majority of the candidate pool: the pure catalogers and the pure systems people. “You were neither, but you had the ability to work with both sides. You were the only one in the pool who got it.”

I walked into the Technical Services department one morning, having been gone the day before to an OhioLINK meeting. I saw one of my coworkers and smiled and said my hellos. Something was off when she didn’t return the greeting. I asked if everything was ok.

She was one of several Technical Services staff to receive layoff notices the day before.

In all, my department was cut almost in half during the first round of layoffs and “early” retirements. The majority of the layoffs and retirements in the libraries came from Technical Services.

The library dean at the time continued to funnel sparse resources into other departments, even with additional rounds of layoffs being planned by the university. Technical Services was left to keep up production with essentially half the staff and a deficit of 60+ years of tacit institutional knowledge.

Second round of retirements and layoffs came soon after the first. Luckily TS was spared; however, it became apparent by the library dean’s actions that my position was seen as a nicety for the department and not a necessity.

I don’t think they ever replaced me when I left in 2011.

Catcode and Libcatcode grew in tandem in the Codecademy’s Code Year push of 2012. After years of being called the odd one in the worlds of Technical Services and #libtech, I saw these efforts as a possible way to get people to see the obvious. Cataloging/metadata work and library coding are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are secret siblings. For me, this is on the level of saying that grass is green and the sky is blue. It just is.

And the conversation started. A code4lib preconference on the subject. An ALCTS/LITA interest group forming and a preconference at Annual. The first #mashcat conference.

And then conversation stalled.

This isn’t the first time a conversation about cataloging and coding stalled. Many have started on various levels, and yet we always find ourselves having to start from Square One each time we revive the conversation. Why is that?

“Not all catalogers.”

I tweeted that phrase some time ago. It is a problematic phrase to use; for example, it echoes back to “not all men…” to defend against criticism from feminists. But then you have “not all women…” being used as well. I suspect this usage stems from the desire of the speaker to break away from the stereotype being invoked in the conversation. And yet, at the same time, using the phrase in this context reinforces the social trappings that come with the stereotype – “not all $x” denotes that a set within a group does indeed fit the stereotype being discussed and the speaker shares the feeling of disdain for those who fit the stereotype; therefore, reinforcing the majority view of hir group.

Am I that desperate to climb the class structure in librarianship? To reinforce the stereotype by showing that I do not fit it, thus gaining social credibility with my peers?

However, I am no longer a cataloger. I am a systems person who is being hurled into the realm of library middle management.

Perhaps I am experiencing the library equivalent of my inserting an “r” when I say “wash” when I forget that that is not the “proper way” of saying the word while in certain company.

Knowledge is power. Technology is power. Which one has more power, though? I have the knowledge and the technology. I can create the metadata as well as systematically work with it. There are people who have the knowledge and there are people who have the technological skills. However, we see the conversation between the two as more of a one way street.

“You have the knowledge? Here, learn the technological skill!”

Is that what we want from catalogers and metadata people? Are we expected to lean in, to pull ourselves by our bootstraps and code ourselves to relevancy in the current library landscape?

Lean in. I know many who did… only to fall, mostly through no fault of their own.

I watch the new round of conversations start, a #mashcat revived. Every year I feel less lonely; the odd TS person out is joined by other odd people, these hybrids, these “non-traditional” library people. Many folks wear many hats; one thing I heard from folks in the first #mashcat Twitter chat was that they work in both metadata and systems. Great!

And yet… I worry.

While I am excited about the resurrection of #mashcat, we will run into The Wall like the previous conversations did. Folks will hit The Wall hard like I’ve done many times before. There are so many times one can throw themselves against The Wall, but I’m still breathing and able to figure out how to break down The Damned Thing.

I am not sure what The Wall entirely consists of: stereotypes, inertia surrounding change, cynicism brought on by previous conversations. One big component of The Wall, though, is the apathy of librarianship at large about this conversation. They expect the technology to work. They expect the metadata to be there. They don’t care how things are made, like we don’t care how some things that we use in our daily lives are made. As long as it’s there, we’re fine. Status quo achieved for the day.

I don’t know if dragging every library worker kicking and screaming into this conversation is the way to knock down The Wall, but it has become apparent through observations that The Wall cannot be bypassed or knocked down by only a few. We can’t lean on The Wall to knock It down. We need tools: hammers, pickaxes, jackhammers, sledgehammers. We need people to not only provide these tools but to help us to knock The Wall down. It doesn’t do us any good if the same people try to take down The Wall time after time. We need all the help we can get.

A wrecking ball would help as well.

It’s time to have the conversation not be dictated by cowering to stereotypes, to power structures, to class structures.

It’s time for this conversation not be dictated by the actions of a few and being expected to excuse or apologize for these few, reinforcing the status quo every time we do so.

And it’s about time to drag every G*d-damned library manager and administrator by their ears, kicking and screaming, into this conversation.

Rumor is that they have a wrecking ball we can use.