il2007: how to lose your new tech librarians, part 1

Jenny Benevento, Vocabulary Developer

SLIDES

Or how not to hire a new tech librarian every 1.5 years…

new librarians are leaving the field more frequently than in the past – what are we doing to cause this?

organizational culture drives our tech-savvy librarians away –

if you want to drive them away…

• you should ridicule tech milestones and celebrate your traditional services
• you should curtail their extracurricular activities
• you should discourage their provessional excitement and creativity
• you should adopt technology just because you think it’s cool or heard about it in an article
• you should talk negatively about tech companies that would offer your tech person a job they would love (in a heartbeat(
• adopt a kafkaesque system toward tech development decisions (put librarians who hate technology on the committee)
• adopt technologies as soon as they’ve stopped being relevant
• put them in teh basement -”they don’t like social behavior, don’t they?”

To managers:

• just because you’ve been promoted to management doesn’t mean you are a good manager
• your masters degree clearly means you know more than everyone
• your 20 years of life in this library mean you know more than everyone
• treat your techie as the most replacable person
• when you hire them, tell them they’ll be able to focus on technology and then
• don’t fund their projects
• you should tell them you want new technologies, but reject their suggestions
• have no plan for administrative rewards for their work
• go out of your way in public to state that you have no faith in technical staff or the direction they are taking you library
• don’t make an effor to understand anything about technology
• tell them “that’s not how we do it here, that’s not what we do here”
• you should equate all technical knowledge
• assume the techie can immediately learn any new skill without any support
• expect the techie to solve all technical problems in the library
• you should expect their projects to be finished immediately

What you should do….

• you can’t change everything, but you should realize that they can go elsewhere and you should try to meet them half way
• there are management classes and books that you can ingest – learn how to be better to your employees
• they’re different, just like everyone else. except maybe they have more employment options…
• passion for the profession – if you aren’t passionate about your job, no one will beneath you will be either. actually tech people have a reputation for being more passionate.

To the tech librarians:

• if your library doesn’t value tech, get out.
• when you leave, specifically state that you love libraries and that you would love to work there, but that the organization doesn’t value tech.