A few weekends ago I gave a talk at the KU Diversity Summit, an online conference that took place virtually, but also physically at the Kansas University School of Journalism in Lawrence Kansas. As you know, I have a soft spot for Kansas. As you may or may not know, I usually don’t do online conferences because I have a hard time dealing with the technical and social snafus that usually accompany them. I like to give talks, not be told I have to install Windows-only software or register for a site with sketchy privacy policies just to interact with listeners. I know other people can deal with this stuff gracefully and I happily recommend them when I’m saying “Thanks but no thanks” to people. I may be getting a little cranky in my old age, but I’m also just interested in giving higher quality talks less frequently. This is a goal for 2012.

Anyhow, the team from KU charmed me and assured me the tech issues would be minimal; I could do everything over Skype, have slides or not have slides and they’d field questions from the live audience and from Twitter. It went well. They had a tight schedule so asked me if ten minutes was okay. I said “Fifteen?” As it was I managed to do it in about twelve. The full video, all five hours of the conference, is available online here, but I’ve trimmed out the part that I did, short talk, short Q&A session afterwards and links to more information are at librarian.net/talks/ku. It think it’s a pretty concise summary of the major digital divide issues that I think are facing people and libraries.

This month I’m heading to Cambridge for a DPLA meeting and then to Augusta Maine for a one-day meeting about Ebooks and Libraries which is sure to be interesting and informative. I’m giving a lunchtime talk but also leading a breakout session called “Ebooks are Great! Books are great!” talking about the differences between books and ebooks. Based on some of the feedback I’ve been getting on Twitter and elsewhere, that will be a lively topic.

Next month I’ll really be scooting around a bit and my drop-in time and evening Mac classes are starting up locally which will keep me busy and pretty happy. Anyone attending the NELA conference, the Michigan Library Association conference or the CLIR symposium in Milwaukee, please do say hello. In the meantime I’ll be updating somewhat more here and getting back to my own RSS reading so I hope to be less of a stranger.

Hi and thanks for having me here. Congratulations to all of you, I’m honored to get to share this important and transitional moment with you.

Like you, I went to an alternative school, Hampshire, and am similarly interested in personal vision and radical thinking as the brochure says that you are.

By way of introduction, I tell people I’m the most famous librarian in Vermont [not as fancy as you might think], an “internet folk hero” dedicating her life to eradicating the digital divide in the US and helping turn libraries into their democratic ideals free from the influence of bad technology, bad people, and bad laws.

It’s as true as any of the other “who I am” explanations. At some level, realistically, what most people in the world know about you is what they see, what you tell them, maybe combined with what they can corroborate elsewhere. It’s important to have a good story and in the age of limited internet attention spans, it helps if it’s short. Wikipedia calls me an internet folk hero (and no I didn’t write that myself though I suppose I could have) and I like that & I’m sticking to it. It’s not actually so tough to be a folk hero, and I think it’s one of the natural paths from this sort of starting point, where you are now. I’ll talk a little about how I got here.

Part one is framing

I’ve got slightly different answers to the “who are you” question depending exactly on what’s asked.

- what I do for a job

(“um I run a big Internet community”)

- how I spend my time

(“I stare out the window and look at birds in-between answering a lot of email and making Keynote slides and reading books for hours in airports”)

- what I love doing

(“I teach email to old people… no seriously it’s the best thing there is”)

but I’m one of those people with a poor life/work balance, or maybe a great one, depending on whether you think that your small-w work and big-W WORK [your calling, your passion, your raison d'etre, whatever you call it] should be the same or different.

Mine are the same: I love the democratizing power of the library and the internet and share it with as many people as possible. I lucky that I get to do this for a job … but I did some work to get to this place, and also some not-quite-work. And the good news for you guys is that for the most part you now get to spend some time watching yourselves, out in the great wide world, figuring out what your Work actually is. It’s a time for doing and you can, in fact you should, put off reflecting until later. Now is the time for screwing around.

I live in Randolph, just up the road from here, and I spend a lot of time teaching people how to use computers at the local vocational high school in town. Every week I get to show someone the internet who has never seen it before; it’s great. I also travel around the country teaching librarians how to teach people to use computers. I wrote a book last year about the digital divide and how librarians can use their community resources to help people overcome it. I also run a giant community website called MetaFilter that has an online Q&A subsite where the community can ask each other questions. That’s how I met Braja, she’s my internet friend. As much as I think the library is important, I think it’s more important that people learn to answer their own questions, ones they maybe don’t need a professional for

I’m the resident librarian there, sort of, though my title is COO or “community manager” depending on whether I’m being fancy or not. You may notice that none of these jobs I’ve mentioned involves working inside a library. The good news is that this is fine. It’s an exciting time to be a librarian, even just part of the librarian diaspora. Even in the age of “You can find it all on Google”. We’ve got a whole Justice League of librarians working undercover on the internet and elsewhere, fighting for your cyber rights and other things. You probably know a few. If you don’t, you probably should.

So, you’re excited about your Big-W work… find ways to make it sound exciting to other people.

So, part one is framing your issues…

Part two is preparation

When I graduated from Hampshire College (a place a lot like this) a million years ago, we had a commencement speaker who I had never heard of who gave us all some advice that was quite useful to me personally.

Her advice: get some sleep.

At the time I’d been working on my thesis — an analysis of generic pronouns in English, very important stuff to me at the time — non-stop for several solid months, and this was actually something I needed to do, REST. You probably do too.

But more to the point, “get some sleep” was a metaphor for the other things I needed to do in my life in order to be effective. Because as much as I also want to be happy, and loved, and secure and … oh I don’t know beautiful, athletic, something? what I really wanted was to change the world. It’s one of the reasons I went to Hampshire in the first place. I wanted things to be different, more like how *I* wanted them to be and I was idealistic enough to think I could do this, still do actually.

In order to do that, as much as I enjoyed just arguing into the wind about my great ideas, I had longer term goals and had to dig in and play the long game with people who weren’t necessarily working from the same playbook as I was. The long game doesn’t just take time, it takes stamina, endurance, some good nature, and grace. And you’ve got more of that if you’re rested, relaxed, at ease. Sleep helps that. Keeping your stress level down helps that. Eating lots of apples helps. I probably get more professional mileage out of not getting angry than almost anything else.

This is a difficult thing to manage if you get wrapped up in the 24 hour news cycle (what I sometimes call the fake news) and divert your attention with inconsequential bickering cultivated by people who are trying to sell you something. Or if you get crabby by other people’s bad behavior and it sets off bad behavior of your own. Stay calm, don’t get cranky.

This long game, which I wasn’t even quite aware that I was undertaking at the time, involved getting to a place where people would actually listen to what I had to say (more on that in a sec) because with an institution as stalwart and venerable as Public Libraries (like many others), you need to come to the table with your bona fides if you want people to pay attention to your advice much less take it. I’m not saying this is always right, just that this is how it is. Sometimes it’s good to know both what’s right AND what’s real.

So you’ve got framing, laying your constitutional groundwork…

Part three is communication

In my universe, people are saying libraries are in danger without filling in the rest of the story … that they’re in danger because people have forgotten how to quantify the social good of democratic public institutions, forgotten how to value having an educated and informed populace and decided that it’s somehow appropriate to employ “belt tightening” library closures in our communities that disproportionately affect the poor and working class. People are using public libraries in America more than ever before, 71% of libraries report that they are the only source of free access to computers and the internet in their communities. They’re essential, not endangered. Or maybe both…

Conflict makes good drama, sells more newspapers, gets more clicks and keeps people from changing the channel but it’s only a small part of the whole overall story, and it’s important to know and to tell the whole story, and be well-rested enough to tell it as many times as it needs to be told, to the right people. The long game, keep telling that story. Keep saying what’s true.

For me this includes talking about the digital divide, reminding people that a third of Americans don’t have internet at home and 1/5th don’t have any internet at home AT ALL. Explaining how challenging it is to teach people to use technology as library funding is getting cut, and how crucial.

These sorts of talking points, updated as they change, made up many of the small campaigns in my larger crusade for public libraries and free information. And over time, it added up. I had a little blog. I talked about what I cared about. I went to conferences. I spoke to people. I always emailed or called back when a reporter contacted me [which they do often when you're on the first page of results for the word "librarian" on Google and your phone number is on your website, reporters are sort of notoriously lazy] I noticed that slowly, over time, people were *asking* me what I thought, more than I was just simply telling them. Every state has a library association. Every association has an annual conference. There are lots of opportunities to step up and tell your stories no matter what profession you’re in.

I didn’t overthink and stay uninvolved because I thought maybe I wasn’t the right person to talk about something, I got involved in what was interesting to me, and I did the work. I went to the Democratic National Convention as an “official blogger” in 2004. I got to meet Barack Obama. I’ve recently been involved in Harvard’s Digital Public Library of America project as an “independent librarian.” It’s a lot of meetings (some of them early) but with a lot of interesting people. I tell them about what I do and go home and tell people about who I met and what they’re doing.

Some of what I do is go places that “my people” don’t go to, represent us, and then come back and tell my folks what I found there, whether it’s being a techie at a librarian conference, a librarian at the tech conference or a rural librarian at the big city meeting. The world needs people who stay and people who roam, cross-pollinate, bumblebee style.

Sometimes I was surprised that I’d be one of very few people in my communities speaking out cogently and clearly for my ideas, against filtering, against digital rights management, for copyright reform and open access, that sort of thing.

Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker movement sometimes called this isolation of idealism the “long loneliness” and said it could only be solved by the love that comes with community. I feel that by sharing your ideas and ideals with others, you’re not as lonely.

So you’ve got framing, preparing and communicating…

Part four is reflection, perspective & recommitment

I’m not so in love with my ideas that I think they’re right for everyone (copyright has its roles, filtering can be okay in certain circumstances, drm may be inevitable), but in the big tug of war that we cynically call the “marketplace of ideas”, I’m okay being way out on one end and helping nudge or pull people away from the comfy center, the place where you wind up if you don’t make many choices.

By doing the things that I’d enjoyed, and arguing for the things I’d cared passionately about, over time I’d created a career and something of a reputation. In the looking back over what I’d been doing it was easy to say “oh hey I meant to do that” but really I’d had no idea, for a long time. By reflecting over what I’d been doing, seeing my priorities laid out as an accumulation of past choices, the path was clear in hindsight, and it also offered me a direction forward. You think you know what you want, sometimes, but there’s clarity in seeing your desires made real, distilling and determining your priorities through your actions and what you’ve been able to do. And if you look back and say “That wasn’t what I wanted” you’ve got the option to adjust, figure out what went wrong and correct it.

The choices I had been making, though they seemed sort of small at the time — to move to Romania between my first and second years of library school, to take a job working for VISTA after library school instead of an office job, to move to Vermont instead of stay in Seattle, to live in a small community instead of one with better restaurants, to say yes when the reporters called or people asked me to write things, to say no when people wanted to advertise on my site– added up to being the primary components of … me.

Along the way I got a fair amount of pushback, people at every transition point saying the way I’d done things in this stage weren’t going to work in the next. In high school they said “that’s not going to fly in college” In college, it was grad school. In grad school, it was “That’s not going to work in the Real World…” They were well-meaning, but usually wrong. I never did have to get up before 11 am unless I wanted to. I didn’t have to cut off my dreadlocks until I wanted to. I didn’t have to move to a big city. I didn’t have to get a PhD. I didn’t have to settle down.

You all didn’t come to Goddard, to do “individualized studies” because you wanted to take the obvious or simple or pre-determined path. People in Vermont really like to quote Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken poem without maybe understanding that, as Frost himself put it

“It was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life.”

Frost wasn’t sorry; he was an unrepentant curmudgeon. His poem, if you give it a close read, was about two identical paths and after-the-fact rationalizing that the choice you made was the right one. Re-writing your own story and giving yourself a more active role after the fact.

Your time here (or virtually here) has been about cultivating your interests, nurturing your abilities, finding your narrative whether it’s through dancing, drumming, singing, writing, filming, educating interpreting or re-interpreting. This big accomplishment becomes, over time, one small part in your long story.

You may not also know that there is another Jessamyn West–actually there’s a third Jessamyn West, a holistic horse masseuse living in the Pacific Northwest–an author who was popular in the 50s and 60s who wrote a lot of novels about being a Quaker in frontier America. Her book Friendly Persuasion, about pacifism in the face of the Civil War, was adapted into a movie in 1957 starring Gary Cooper and Tony Perkins and made her a brief celebrity.

She used that celebrity somewhat as a platform for her ideas. She was an outspoken… I’m not even sure if you’d call it feminist, but she had a lot of strong unapologetic female characters in her works. She wrote from her bed, where she was the most comfortable, and was an advocate of all-day pajamas (as am I), solitude and other not-particularly-normal life choices for women at the time. Her story is one I keep with me and this quotation from her is one I keep close to my heart.

“You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood – and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.”

Choose wisely. I could wish you luck, but you won’t need it. Pace yourselves. Remember that everything in our lives is part of it. Tell your own story and make sure it’s a good one, don’t worry so much about keeping it short.

Thank you and enjoy yourselves.

Here’s the video of me talking about Ask MetaFilter and online Q&A stuff that I gave at the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. I included the slides a few days ago, but here’s the actual video of the talk, as presented. Big thanks to Caleb Tucker-Raymond for making this video up. You might also like Emily Ford’s lightning talk: What Libraries Can Learn From Kanye.

I went out to Oregon to give a talk to the people who staff L-net, the 24/7 virtual reference service for the state of Oregon. They have a yearly conference which is a lot of fun. Video from the talks will be available at some point, but I figured I’d link to my talk now. I talked about Ask MetaFilter and a little bit about what we do there and how it is and is not like other forms of virtual reference. Lots of stats. Lots of anecdotes and sample questions. The Slideshare version doesn’t seem to have the notes attached and functional (attached yes, accurate, no), so while I hammer that out from them, you can also go to the talk’s page on librarian.net and download whichever version you want. Thanks to all who attended on Friday.

Talking about the digital divide in Connecticut is a lot different from talking about it in Texas, or even Vermont. Unlike most states I’ve looked at, Connecticut really doesn’t have a large population of people who live in an area where they can’t get broadband. I’m sure it has the same numbers of offline people, generally speaking, but whatever their reasons for being offline are, they’re not for lack of access. I admit, I played this for laughs a bit at my CLA since I know that people aren’t going to confuse broadband access with technological know-how and will still see that there is work to be done.

All my talks went well. Here’s what I’ve been up to recently

• Last Thursday I was on a panel with some interesting people including the soon-to-be-president of ALA Molly Raphael. We answered some provocative questions about the future of libraries and mostly had a great time.
• Friday I gave my talk about developing a technology curriculum for libraries. For those of you used to my usual stuff, this was a departure. Not heavily attended–it was in one of the last timeslots of the conference–but I was pleased with it. If you’re considering a technology curriculum, you might be interested in my short set of notes/slides. I got to present with Anna Fahey-Flynn who is Curriculum Development Librarian at Boston Public and it was really interesting to see how their tech instruction program is coming together.
• Over the weekend I walked around in the sun in Massachusetts and then headed to CT for the CT Library Association conference. Before attending the conference I was interviewed for public acess TV in Manhattan about the Google Books project and copyright and a few other things. No idea when this will go live, but if you think you’ve seen me on tv talking about Google Books, you may have.
• Tuesday I gave a talk about myths about the digital divide, similar to my Texas talk but with some local examples.

As usual, I also got to attend some great presentations including a talk by BPL and the Internet Archive [at MLA] about how they’re working together to provide digital access to library content via Open Library. This may be a personal thing, but I’m always excited when libraries test boundaries and tell us “We checked with our lawyers and they think this is an acceptable level of risk.” I also saw a CMS smackdown/comparison [Drupal vs. WordPress] by Polly-Alida Farrington and Shanon Clapp which was full of good information and delivered with a friendly “you can do it!” approach. I also saw John Palfrey’s closing keynote talking about the digital divide and some of what Harvard’s Library Lab has been up to, and the DPLA and other things. I’ve mostly seen him in contexts where he was talking to non-librarians so it was fun to see him explaining a lot of these big idea projects on my home turf.

I’m home for a bit, back to teaching my Know Your Mac classes, staffing drop-in time, filling in at the public library and waiting for my book to be in print [this week, here's hoping] and then travelling to Portland at the end of the month for the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit.

MLA – Thursday the 28th at 1 pm – I’ll be on the Future of Libraries, or, What the Heck are You Thinking? panel along with Scot Colford, Kieth Michael Fiels and Maureen Sullivan which is sure to be interesting and probably fun.
• MLA – Friday the 29th at 10:30 I’ll be talking about Curriculum Development for Public Libraries along with Anna Fahey-Flynn from BPL. Sort of a new direction and I’m looking forward to it.
• CLA – Tuesday May 3rd at 2:40 I’ll be talking about the myths we believe about the digital divide and offer some researched based statistics as to what’s really going on.

In june I’ll be doing a talk for NELA-ITS and heading over to Oregon for the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit in The Dalles. This is all a good way to channel fidgets since I’m all “EEeeeeee” waiting for my book to come out. Thanks in advance for saying hello.

My employer, MetaFilter, has a strong social component as well as claiming over 200 librarians among its members. While the site itself is fairly restricted to bloggish interaction, we have some super-organized members who like to compile Best Of sorts of lists over on our wiki. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the Read Me page on the wiki now has links to over 1000 threads worth of book recommendations.

Last week I was down at Simmons where I gave a really short talk about … talking. Basically talking about what public speaking entails and offers in the larger world of librarianship. It’s called “You Do What For A Job?” and you might like it.

So, since I was sticking around town working this month I didn’t go to Internet Librarian or most of NELA, and a few smaller conferences. It was fun to read other people’s summaries, and occasionally real-time reactions, for all the presentations. I’ll be making a sort of “what I learned from not going to conferences” post sometime in the next few days. For now, I’m done with public speaking until March and I’m pretty okay with that. It’s been a fun Fall season.

1. The book’s title is Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. The book is already for sale on Amazon. This is sort of weird, watching its sales rank soar and plummet six months before its even available. I set up an author page there, but I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m aware that the book is expensive. I’m aware that I could sell it more cheaply if it were self-published. I know I don’t really need any of the statusing that comes along with publishing with an established publisher. I’ll probably grouse that I could have made a better cover. However, I don’t think I would have written this book without an external deadline, even though I think in many ways this is the book I’ve been “meant to write” for some time now. So, thank you to Barbara for suggesting it and helping make it a reality.

2. I really cocooned while I was writing. I stopped reading my RSS feeds for about the first time ever. I kept my IM client off. I’d peek at Twitter and try to remember to keep adding things to my blog. I sort of checked out from my online and offline communities except for work and occasional Twitter updates. It was an odd thing to do.

3. I woke up every morning determined to write at least 1000 words and would tell myself “I chose this.” but it was still really difficult. Some days the words just flowed. Some days 1000 words would take eight hours. I type about 90 words a minute, when I’m on a roll this would all go fast. I had to keep reminding myself that in many ways I am the expert on this topic and so it was okay to speak from a position of authority and not have to cite statistics all the time.

4. I felt like I was becoming a total dullard. “How’s it going Jessamyn?” “Pretty good, I’m writing a book.” “Still?” This became easy because after a while I just didn’t feel that I had the free time to go out. I’m working on re-entry, it’s going okay.

5. The book has my voice which means I say that some things work and some don’t. I’m sure people will have strong opinions about some of it and I mentally prepared myself for a lot of pushback, more than I will likely get. I make a lot of assertions about how I see the digital divide and what I think is working and not working to mitigate it. I hope people don’t get bogged down in nitpicking. I hope no one that I mention feels that I was uncharitable.

6. I asked for and received a lot of help from people–editing help, requests for pullquotes, some open Twitter requests for information, proofreading–and it’s weird to me that only my name will be on it. I have an extensive “thanks” section. I’m sure I’ve forgotten as many people as I’ve included. It’s odd, in a lot of ways the path I’ve chosen has room for a lot of showboating, doing public presentations, talking on my blog about what I’ve been doing or thinking about, and yet I get timid when there’s actually a situation where it’s useful to be all BUY MY BOOK.

That is the report about the book. You can buy it or not. I think it will be good.

You can see my notes and slides here. Success with Social Networking. Thanks very much to the nice people at Mid-York for setting up such a fun day.

Hiya. I’m preparing for a talk on Social Software that I’m giving in Utica, New York next Friday. I’ve been travelling significantly less and staying home writing much more. It’s been going well. I noticed last night on facebook [thanks Trevor] that I appear to be cartoonified and on the cover of this month’s Library Journal. Of course this is the post-Reed Business LJ, so I can’t find the cover on their new website and Trevor confirms there’s no actual mention of him or me in the actual article, but hey why pick nits? Interested folks can head over to his facebook profile and ID all the other luminaries on the cover including Emily Sheketoff, Nancy Pearl, Toni Morrison, Ginnie Cooper, Jill Nishi, Salman Rushdie, Mario Ascencio, Trevor Dawes, Camila Alire and Keith Michael Fiels floating away holding on to some balloons.

I always skip my blog’s birthday because it’s 4/20 which is on or near Earth Day, the holiday of stoners everywhere, and usually school vacation. So hey, my blog is now eleven! And I write in it much less than I used to. Partly this is because I’ve got a 1000 word/day minimum writing deal with myself getting my book out the door. I just noticed you can pre-order it from Amazon which sort of freaks me out. I set up a page for the book but there’s really nothing there yet. I hope the cover looks okay. Partly I’ve been doing a lot of other things. Though my crazy six weeks of travel is over — with a whimper, not a bang, since I didn’t get to PLA which displeases me — I’ve been doing my tech work in town and started riding my bike around a lot more. Spring is delightful here.

I’m still answering a lot of library-type emails (someone looking for a copy of DDC 20, got one?) and working at MetaFilter which contains more than its share of writing. I seem to be pouring more of my “this is why the digital divide is important” efforts into the book, though I’ve been pulling out little snippets here and there.

And I gave a talk about Open Source and why it’s important to small libraries at a local conference for educators recently. The notes for the talk are here: Solving Problems with FOSS- What works and doesn’t work in Vermont’s Libraries. It was a great talk but I think I aimed it for more of a library-ish audience and teachers and IT folks have different goals. I did get to talk to a lot of people in my region about what sorts of tech things work and don’t work, and saw a great presentation about MYTH-TV, an open source alternative to home DVR stuff. Fascinating stuff. Interesting times.

Photo is from this post at inhabitat about this art exhibit.

In the meantime I’ll be reading offline more, writing here less, and not travelling out of state again for work until summertime. Thanks to the wonders of RSS, you’ll know when I’m adding more content here [and I've added my twitterstream to the sidebar] but I sadly won’t be heading to Computers in Libraries. Hope it’s fun.

And I’m still unpacking. I got back late Sunday and spent most of today helping the folks at the high school get settled in with their new mail server. However I did read this post about the status of Haitian libraries that I thought was worth a mention. Things are better than expected, and better than first reported. Of course, as always, there’s still work to be done.