http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib107.html

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians

#107, July 20, 2001

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Guru Interviews

  1. Tara Calishain
  2. Jenny Levine, part I
  3. Jenny Levine, Part II
  4. Reva Basch
  5. Sue Feldman
  6. Jessamyn West
  7. Debbie Abilock
  8. Kathy Schrock
  9. Greg Notess
  10. William Hann
  11. Chris Sherman
  12. Gary Price
  13. Barbara Quint
  14. Rory Litwin

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Wanna See Your Name in Lights?

Or at least on this page, anyway? I'd like to print here your contributions as well as mine. As you've noticed, articles are brief, somewhere between 200 and 500 words -- something to jog people's minds and get their own good ideas flowing. I'd also be happy to run other people's contributions to the regular features like Favorite Sites on _____. I'll pay you the same rate I pay me: nothing.

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PRIVACY POLICY: I don't collect or reveal information about subscribers.

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Cool Quotes

The collected quotes are at http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/cool.html

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Drop me a Line

Want to comment, ask questions, submit articles, or invite me to speak or do some training? Contact me at: marylaine at netexpress.net

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When and How To Search the Net






Visit My Other Sites


BookBytes

http://marylaine.com/
bookbyte/index.html
My page on all things book-related. NEW STUFF ADDED in August

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Best Information on the Net

http://library.sau.edu/
bestinfo/
The directory I built for O'Keefe Library, St. Ambrose University, still my favorite pit stop on the information highway.

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My Word's Worth

http://marylaine.com/
myword/index.html
a weekly column on books, words, libraries, American culture, and whatever happens to interest me.

Subject Index to My Word's Worth at
http://marylaine.com/
myword/subindex.html

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My personal page

http://marylaine.com/
personal.html

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SUBJECT INDEX to Past Issues

http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/archive.html

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Neat New Stuff I Found This Week
July 20: Bob Dylan, newsworthy cats, digital photography, the Confederate flag controversy, and more.

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My resume

http://marylaine.com/
resume.html
Or why you might want to hire me for speaking engagements or workshops. To see outlines for presentations I've done, click on Handouts

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What IS Ex Libris?

http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/purpose.html

The purpose and intended scope of this e-zine -- always keeping in mind that in response to readers, I may add, subtract, and change features.

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Highlights from Previous Issues:



My Rules of Information

  1. Go where it is
  2. The answer depends on the question
  3. Research is a multi-stage process
  4. Ask a Librarian
  5. Information is meaningless until queried by human intelligence
  6. Information can be true and still wrong


BEING AN ANOMALY: MALE LIBRARIANS

I know what it's like to be the only woman in male-dominated organizations -- uncomfortable! -- so I always wondered what it was like for men to work in female-dominated professions like librarianship. A while back, I asked my male readers about their experiences, and several of you responded. I also read a survey of male librarians in the March, 1994 American Libraries, and a book by Christine Williams, Still a Man's World: Men Who Do Women's Work. Between these, I think I've gotten some sense of the pleasures and awkwardnesses of this situation.

The biggest culture clash may lie in performance expectations. Several men said they felt they were more willing than women to make sacrifices for career advancement. What they demanded of themselves and those they supervised was achievement, excellence, competitiveness, enterprise, and hard work, and there was some resentment of women who fell short. One man quoted in American Libraries snorted, "There is an increasing sense that women can underachieve . . . . But this is supposed to be glossed over because they (women) are more 'nurturing,' 'supportive,' 'sensitive.'" Another man quoted in the article complained that "[women's] actual output is ignored in favor of their value as 'role models.'" One of my readers complained about women who return to library jobs after time off for family responsibilities but haven't bothered to retrain themselves for a world where OPACs have replaced card catalogs.

Those may be sweeping generalizations, but if there's a kernel of truth there, it should make for an interesting time come the annual performance evaluation. One library director, who was a truckdriver in his youth, was a little daunted the first time an employee cried when he criticized her work. He says, "supervising women has called for much more sensitivity to feelings than I ever needed supervising men. You can't really swear at women." Another reader noted that when he had to criticize men's performance, they didn't take it personally, but women nursed their resentment about performance critiques for a long time.

Christine Williams found a widespread expectation that men would naturally want advancement to administrative positions; she noted that whereas women were sometimes confronted by a "glass ceiling," men seemed to have a "glass escalator." Interestingly, this occurred regardless of whether the men wanted administrative jobs or not; one man who enjoyed his work as a children's librarian was downgraded for "not shooting high enough." Yes, they said, he was an excellent storyteller, and the children liked him, but "I wasn't doing the management-oriented work that they thought I should be doing."

A number of men resented being on the wrong side of a double standard. They didn't like women expecting them to do the heavy lifting jobs, deal with problem patrons, and work late night shifts (because personal safety wasn't supposed to be an issue for them). They didn't appreciate conversations in which female colleagues made dismissive comments about the entire male gender, and told them that, being men, of course they "didn't get it" -- especially since they knew that if they made similar criticisms of women they could be nailed for sexual harassment.

There's an up side to the anomalous position of men in this women's world, though, including love of the work itself. One man, who fell into the job of children's librarian, found that "I liked the work, and had a gift for storytelling and sharing." The fact that they get to deal with books and ideas, and patrons and colleagues who care about them, is clearly one of the most rewarding aspects of the job. Other men commented on the pace of the work -- one said he enjoyed working with women because "men are too territorial and competitive."

For one library director I spoke with, one of the great pleasures of working with women was that "it's easier to talk to women about the truly important things in life, family being one," and he didn't have to pretend to care about sports. (He tells about being at a professional conference while the NCAA tournament was going on. A male colleague, noticing he was from Iowa, started talking enthusiastically about the Iowa Hawkeyes' performance in the playoffs. Our hero, who didn't know or care that Iowa was IN the playoffs, was rescued by a female colleague who proceeded to talk basketball with the man for an hour.)

So, I now know a little more than I did before about being a minority. I realize that I'm as likely to make gender assumptions as men are, but less likely to be held accountable for them. Men have had to retrain themselves, learn to refrain from the kinds of sexual and sexist comments and jokes they might have made around other men, and learn to limit what they say and do to that which is legal and inoffensive. It sounds like now it's time for women to monitor our own assumptions, comments, and behavior in the same way.

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Re last week's article about the New York Times ripping freelancers' articles out of its database, see Barbara Quint's wonderful essay in NewsBreak, "Stop the Trash Trucks: a Tasini Case Damage-Control Proposal," at http://infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010716-1.htm

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COOL QUOTE

Libraries are the real birthing places of the universe for me. I lived in my hometown library more than I did at home. I loved it at night, prowling the stacks on my fat panther feet. All of that went into Something Wicked . . .

Ray Bradbury, quoted by Stephen King in Danse Macabre.

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You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.

[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]