InsideOCULA

Deadline for submission: April 4, 2008

Colleagues are invited to submit essays, articles, and pictures for publication in our spring edition.

Submit items to jennifer.peters-lise@senecac.on.ca

InsideOCULA is the official publication of the Ontario College and University Library association.

Thank you all very much for your contribution.

Thursday, April 24th at 5:30pm
University of Toronto’s Faculty Club

Meet and mingle with your colleagues and hear a talk from Dr. Kevin Stolarick:

Kevin Stolarick, PhD, is the Associate Director and Research Associate at The Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He combines a depth of knowledge with an appreciation of the importance of finding and sharing the knowledge or “pearls of wisdom” gained from his comprehensive understanding of the Creative Class and the Creative Economy. Kevin provided quantitative research and analytical support to Richard Florida during the development of his books The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. He continues in collaboration with Richard and other researchers. Kevin will speak to us about the creative class; what we mean when we say “prosperity”, what the goals are and how we can achieve them.

Registration details coming soon!

Your OCULA Spring Dinner Committee
Julie Hannaford
Sandra Langlands
Don McLeod
Marian Press

HEAD, LIBRARY SYSTEMS & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

The University of Saskatchewan is one of the leading medical-doctoral universities in Canada. Its Strategic Directions and Integrated Plan outline a vision focused on international standards in all activities, academic pre-eminence, and creating a sense of place in Saskatchewan, Western Canada, the North and beyond.

Reporting to the Assistant Dean, the Head of Library Systems & Information Technology (LS&IT) is responsible for providing leadership in the development and effective delivery of new and existing systems and technology services across the Library, as well as managing the effective implementation of change in the unit.

The ideal candidate will bring a successful record as a leader, manager and mentor during times of technological change. S/he will also bring experience leading high-volume IT operations, programming and project development. This is a tenure-track position and as such requires active engagement in research and scholarly activities. An MLS/MLIS is required.

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply, however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. The University of Saskatchewan is committed to Employment Equity. Members of designated groups (women, Aboriginal peoples, people with disabilities and visible minorities) are encouraged to apply.

To learn more about this exciting opportunity, call Maxine Adam or Maureen Geldart at (604) 926-0005 or forward your application package (current CV, letter of application and reference list) in confidence to info@thegeldartgroup.com

HEAD, MURRAY LIBRARY

The University of Saskatchewan is one of the leading medical-doctoral universities in Canada. Its Strategic Directions and Integrated Plan outline a vision focused on international standards in all activities, academic pre-eminence, and creating a sense of place in Saskatchewan, Western Canada, the North and beyond. The Murray Library, the largest of seven branches, currently has collections primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition, the Murray Library houses special collections and government publications.

Reporting to the Associate Dean, the Head of Murray Library provides leadership in managing the Murray Library, and directing its contribution to the teaching, research and outreach programs of the University. The Head will require great vision and will collaborate with diverse groups within and external to the Library.

The ideal candidate will bring a successful record as a leader, manager and mentor and will have a strong commitment to quality client services and relationship building with diverse client and stakeholder groups. This is a tenure-track position and as such requires active engagement in research and scholarly activities. An MLS/MLIS is required.

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply, however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. The University of Saskatchewan is committed to Employment Equity. Members of designated groups (women, Aboriginal peoples, people with disabilities and visible minorities) are encouraged to apply.

To learn more about this exciting opportunity, call Maxine Adam or Maureen Geldart at (604) 926-0005 or forward your application package (current CV, letter of application and reference list) in confidence to info@thegeldartgroup.com

Dave Hudson from the University of Guelph-Humber was the winner of the iPod Nano!

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the blog during Super Conference 2008.

Chief Librarian of the Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), Mary Ann Mavrinac has years of leadership experience to draw upon, in addition to the training and continuing development she has had in the field of human resource management. Quite the eye-opener, then, to find that one of her key messages entirely concerns ’self-talk’, as psychologists call that unending conversation in our heads that tells us how we think we’re doing relative to our expectations of ourselves and relative to our perceptions of others and of their achievements.

While it may seem simple to just change the tape that keeps us company 24/7, it really isn’t so easily done. Yet, Mavrinac postulates that controlling that inner voice is crucial to our ability to deal with the ubiquitous, frequently unpredictable changes we must learn to expect in our organizations, indeed, in our very lives. Through negative example, she describes the kind of fearful atmosphere and negative fallout that can be created in an organization by negative thinking and fear of change. She identifies three types of people based on how they react to change. In her opinion, we all must learn to fall into the last category, the only one which will lead to adjustment and acceptance of those changes over which we have little or no control and the only one which will prepare us to ‘ride with the waves’ of change. Mavrinac refers to two important sources which may help us to understand the pivital role of ’self-talk’ in successful living, including Mark Leary’s “The curse of the self: self-awareness, egotism, and the quality of human life,” published in 2004 by Oxford University Press.

Thank you, Mary Ann, for an insightful and thought-provoking session. hg
Posted by Heather Glerum, 05.02.2008.

This OCULA session (#1227) was to have been given by Janet Kaufman in cooperation with Melissa Warner, a PhD candidate in organizational psychology at the University of Guelph who was instrumental in doing the research which provided the framework and structure for the presentation. Unfortunately, as with many other non-local delegates, Melissa was unable to be present due to the blizzard which invaded Toronto last Friday. Not surprisingly, Janet very ably covered the entire material of the presentation, giving nary a hint of discomfort with those technical parts which Melissa was to have presented.

All of us –whether worker bees, or queen– have, at one time or another, considered the material of the topic: creating and/or maintaining a balance between work, other activities and family, though not necessarily in that order. What the Library at U of Guelph did was to cooperate with the Centre for Families, Work and Well-being on a research project aimed primarily at assessing the state of awareness among managers at the U of Guelph of the need for employees, including themselves, to have a balance between work and ‘life’, and secondarily at learning to put conditions into play that together can result in this elusive goal.

The researchers looked at various factors that might affect employees’ work, such as societal influences, institutional and personnel policies, current work pressures and personal perceptions of all of the above. The case was made for the potential rewards for both parties –ie. the organization and the individual– if this elusive quality of work-life balance were attained.

Through the use of an online survey which attempted to deal with employees’ perceptions of job control, job overload, workplace support and job satisfaction, the researchers were able to gain insights that then guided subsequent training programs, assembled according to their target participants. Managers and staff received separate and different training, though both programs examined SMART goal-setting, action plans and the clear delineation between management and employee responsibilities. The final phase of their research was guided by the question: are the conditions created by these new skills, new approaches, new awareness, etc, are these conditions sustainable over the long term? The answer to that question will be born out in the work and private lives of managers and staff in the years to come.

From any standpoint, managerial or staff, and whatever the specific results uncovered by the Library and the Centre for Family, Work & Well-being at the U of Guelph, any and all attempts to apply this study to our local situations would be an appropriate response to its tenets and findings. hg

Posted by Heather Glerum. Modified 22.02.2008 / hg

New Liaison Librarian
We are pleased to welcome Ryan Allworth, who will serve as liaison librarian for Business and Economics for the next 12 months. Since receiving his MLIS at McGill, he has worked at UBC’s Management Research Library, Price Waterhouse Coopers’ Tax Research Centre in Toronto, and at Simon Fraser University.

I have heard Stephen Abram talk before and was looking forward to hear about what new things he had uncovered. Somehow he manages to find the time to play around with so many new and cool things.

Some to the top trends he mentioned include the Google suite, meebo/chatango, wikipedia, worldcat.org, amazon, del.icio.us, bloglines, zotero, facebook, wordpress and others I was not fast enough to write them all down.

In all the things he through in his presentation, what stuck out most in my mind was the advice of trying to spend 15 minutes a day just looking at one new thing. You didn’t have to implement it but at least you were looking an exploring. 15 minutes to me sounds pretty manageable.   I guess this is our exercise for our minds.

So I left Zuckerman’s presentation quite annoyed. I had a bunch of questions for him that I thought might add to the public dialogue that he’d initiated, but, regrettably, there was no time or space allotted for public Q & A. Now, my questions themselves stem not so much from minor quibbles with isolated claims of his, but from deep misgivings about the fundamental presumptions underlying, and broader implications of, his presentation. And it seems to me that Zuckerman’s presentation and (I hope) the questions to which I’m going to try to point here are worth thinking about for any of us interested in enacting (or, indeed, currently engaged in) attempts to address the violence and severe inequality in the world from our standpoint as information professionals.

(For those who couldn’t make it, Zuckerman’s central project is a humanitarian one: he feels that if more of us (and he’s truly speaking globally) are connected to, and freely dialoguing through, the internet, sharing and respectfully enjoying the differences that seem, currently, to be sites of strife — if we could only overcome the digital divide in this manner, then we could go a long way towards creating the conditions for a more peaceful, humane, and just world. Zuckerman’s projects include Geekcorps and Global Voices Online — both initiatives dedicated, at base, to getting all of us in the world listening to one another through the powerful tool that is the Internet.)

Now, clearly Zuckerman has the best of intentions. He seems to genuinely care about the current state of the world, and seems, perhaps more importantly, to be committed to backing that up with research and action. That’s important. So is his recognition that dialogue — true, respectful dialogue on equal footing, founded on earnest practices of listening — plays a crucial role in change, at whatever level.

But advocating for listening is fairly meaningless if one does not oneself listen to history — and it seems to me that this is where Zuckerman’s project runs into trouble. In particular, Zuckerman seems to have ignored the very long history of what’s been called “international development work,” a history in which, time and again, the plight of communities in the so-called “Third World” (hereafter referred to as the “majority world“) has been made markedly worse (in very real terms — access to clean water, sustainable, meaningful food, etc.) by the forced replacement of local indigenous technologies, communication systems, education systems, philosophies, and so on, with so-called “modern” Western technologies. This history has tended to be marked by two interconnected presumptions:

(a) that problems faced by the majority world are attributable to the absence of technology, monetary wealth, “modern” ideas, material resources, democracy, and “connectivity”

and

(b) that Western-style “modernization” — what’s often called “the privileges we enjoy” — is the answer

I would have liked to see Zuckerman at least acknowledge this history as the crucial backdrop to the work that he’s undertaking as someone concerned with bettering the world. Projects like “One Laptop Per Child” and, it would seem, Zuckerman’s efforts seem to turn on an assumption that effective systems for communication and “connectivity” and education didn’t exist in the majority world prior to Western “civilizing” efforts. And this sort of assumption is one of the cornerstones of paternalism.

But the fundamental question that all of us who wish to be actively involved in efforts to address the world’s probelms need to ask is, “Why is the violence happening?” What particular historical and economic forces are driving the violence in the world? It’s all too easy for the so-called “West” to draw on familiar colonial explanations that populations are simply inherently poor, backward, violent and/or hung up on “tribal differences” — indeed, “underdeveloped” rather than “developed.” Looking at the historical causes and present day details of strife takes time and patience, but it’s the only way that international work can effectively be more than just about the transfer of material wealth, that it can be about global justice.

In the end, I’m not convinced that we as information professionals can best contribute to the world by supporting the spread of $100 laptops (which divert resources from teacher salaries, chalk, etc.) or putting our main efforts behind making sure everyone’s “connected” to the internet. Perhaps we’d better start with our research skills in understanding, and making folks aware of, the more fundamental issues facing the majority world — access to clean water, to sustainable and culturally meaningful food production systems, and to community participation and production not controlled by foreign governments, multinational corporations, and the dollars of rich “Westerners.” Indeed, where clean water is concerned, our fervent culture of upgrade and sense of technological superiority has had it’s own consequences for the majority world.

Now, it might be argued that his desire to see the world hooked up to the Internet does not preclude work in other areas, nor even the prioritizing of work towards more fundamental matters of global justice (clean water, the right not to be bombed, etc.). I think I would have been less annoyed had he acknowledged this rather than suggesting that the world would be a better place if we could all just listen to each other and be as cosmopolitan as possible.

I’m aware that some might see irony in using a blog to critique the usefulness of notions of “Western” technological advancement. It’s worth pointing out, though, that critique is not the same as dismissal: clearly, folks have made use of the internet as a powerful tool in global education and transformation. Just look at Indymedia.org, Rabble.ca, Democracy Now!, Z Communications, and so on. Just today, even at a personal level, I got a great Vandana Shiva article through an online database, found an inspiring Sunera Thobani speech, which I listened to on the way to meet a pal for breakfast, and chatted with far away friends.

But it’s still worth noting the difference between, on the one hand, recognizing the usefulness of a tool at a particular historical moment and in particular contexts, and on the other, positioning the so-called “digital divide” as the central problem of our age and championing the Internet as the solution by which the “dark continent” (!) can be made “less dark” (Zuckerman’s metaphor).

Anyway, all annoyance aside, I do think it would do us well to pause in our efforts, as info professionals, towards global justice and examine the presumptions we are making — very basic presumptions about what constitutes progress, what constitutes education, what constitutes literacy, what constitutes poverty, what constitutes technology, and indeed, whether “development” is best defined in terms of material and monetary accumulation. Asking ourselves these fundamental questions — that is, holding out that the wealth and technological “advancement” of the so-called “West” may be part of the problem rather than the be-all-and-end-all solution — would make all our of efforts that much more humble and that much more genuine. It’s really win-win.
*Sigh*

Anyway, I’m probably missing something and I’ve been yammering on for a while, so I’ll post now and hope that some discussion comes out of this …

Thoughts?

Best,

Dave Hudson