CHARLIE BENNETT: If you're cornered at a party, full of non-library people, and someone says, technical services, what's that? What would you say? 

SUBJECT: I would say that we are the backbone of the library. We buy, we order, we describe, we make available the resources that our users are looking for. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: And then one more question, and you only get a single sentence to answer. Do you have any idea why introversion and technical services seem to go together? 

SUBJECT: Introverts tend to want to be quiet. And technical services is generally a quiet place. Sorry that was two sentences.

CHARLIE BENNETT: No, I heard the semicolon. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks-- the Research Library Rock 'n' Roll Radio Show. I'm Charlie Bennett, in the virtual studio with-- and this is a funny thing folks. I can't see half of them, because all of our connectivity is going out, and the video is disappearing. But I know that Wendy Hagenmaier, Ameet Doshi, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and a guest producer to be named later, are all in the Blue Jeans virtual studio with me. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme, and then use it to create a mix of music, and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it. 

INTERVIEWER 1: That's right, Charlie. Today's show is called telling the technical services story. Our title comes from a book full of ways to show the value that technical services brings to the library, and to the institutions we serve. 

MARLEE GIVENS: And our friend, Sonya Slutskaya is back with us. For once, we're not going to be talking about controversial issues in cataloging. 

FRED RASCOE: But I wore my 'cataloging is not a neutral act' button for this show. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: That it's still a true statement, Fred. Even if we aren't burning it all down today. We will get to hear some other confrontational statements, such as, and I quote, "Documentation can be fun." 

FRED RASCOE: Well, now you're just being ridiculous. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Marlee, Charlie, and I interviewed the coeditors of the book Telling Technical Services Story, Kimberley Edwards, and Tricia Mackenzie from George Mason University. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Sonya, and I co-wrote a chapter in that book, along with our colleagues Heather Jeffcoat, and Karen Viars. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: Kim and Tricia had talked with us, about what they learned while putting the book together, about how the technical services unit of the library can better communicate the value of what they do, within departments, across the library, and campus wide. 

AMEET: And our songs today are about qualities that technical services managers in libraries need. The ability to visualize dream scenarios, being able to put disparate pieces together, and quiet strength. And one of the most important qualities of all is communication. So let's start with a song about keeping the lines of communication open. This is My Conversation by The Uniques, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Uniques. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 
FRED RASCOE: That was My Conversation by The Uniques. And this is Lost in the Stacks. And we are speaking with Kimberley Edwards, and Tricia Mackenzie, co-editors of a new book from ALA Editions, called Telling the Technical Services Story: Communicating Value. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Thank you for agreeing to talk to us. Thank you for letting us participate in your book. It was a lot of fun. And so, I guess, our first logical question is how did you come up with the idea for this book? 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: Well, as so many things start in libraries, it started with a committee meeting, actually. I am on, what was at the time, the Elects Monograph Board. Part of what we would do on that board is periodically, throughout the year, we'll have a meeting in which we brainstorm potential monograph topics. I've been thinking a lot about how when people talk about communication in, and around technical services, it's often portrayed as a happy byproduct of another project entirely. At the same time, we have so many conversations in which we talk about the health of technical services, and how it is reliant on how we communicate our value to others. 

So I went to the meeting, having this thought and thinking, we should start looking into having some book, with edited chapters with from various authors. And it turns out that another board member had been having the exact same thought, which is wonderful. We sort of hashed out what we thought the structure of the book could be in that meeting. And she and I agreed to be co-editors. And just before we set out the call for proposals, it turned out that she wasn't going to be able to be co-editor any longer. But Tricia, and I, she and I worked together. And we've been having these same conversations for years. And so I emailed her, and I said, so you want to edit a book with me? And thankfully, she said yes. So that was how it began. 

TRICIA MACKENZIE: Yeah, and this was my first time editing a book. And we've been collaborating on different projects, and presentations. We've done multiple presentations together over the years. So it just seemed like, OK, this is the new thing that we're going to collaborate on. And then, of course, it's an awesome opportunity. So I'm grateful that she wanted to work with me again. 


SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Can you just elaborate a little bit on something you said. You said communication is a byproduct. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: When you look at the literature on technical services, on the various departments in, and around technical services, there is the occasional chapter, or article that specifically addresses communications. But I think for more of them, it comes up as a part of the project. So let's say you are in an academic library, and your children's section is catalogued entirely in LC. And you decide, through talking to your subject librarians, that it would be better if it was catalogued into it, that it would be better for the students. 

So you go through this entire project. And you think this would be really interesting for other people. So you put together a chapter, or an article, or a presentation. And a lot of the times, when people do that type of thing, when they talk about it, they talk about, we had this conversation. And then here are all the steps that we took to get this project done. And then we told everybody we did this great thing. And I think that makes perfect sense, that that's how it's done, because for so much of the work we do in tech services, the details matter. The steps matter. 

And so addressing those in a presentation, or publication makes sense. But at its heart, that type of project is entirely about communication. It's entirely about hearing from your subject liaisons, hearing from the faculty on campus, that they would find something else useful in the catalog. And going back to your department, and having conversations about whether a project like this is possible, and getting by it. And then after the fact, getting to talk to other people in your community about this great thing that we did to help further your education, or further your experience. 

And I don't necessarily think that people need to change the way that they are writing these chapters, or presenting these things. But I think what got me started, thinking about how I thought of a book like this should be put together, is that I felt like, because we see only little glimpses of the communication in each one of these disparate places, we don't think of it as communication as a whole. 

And so I thought if we could bring all of these chapters together in one spot, we could see all of these types of projects are really about communication within your department, or all of these types of projects are really about communication within your library, or communication with your stakeholders. If we change how we think about these things. It may change a little bit how we approach projects like that. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Since the subtitle of the book is communicating value, is there a message you're trying to send to technical services about indicating value? 

TRICIA MACKENZIE: And this is maybe more not communication within your own department, or necessarily within your own division. But in the chapters where-- what is it? The mining college in Colorado, I think, they really had to work to communicate with their Budget Office what their needs were, and what the needs of their faculty were. And so that was a whole process that they really needed to focus on, to get the money they had needed, because I think initially, the librarians there, we just couldn't put in a request. And we would either get the money, or we wouldn't get the money. And then I realized over time that they were getting a smaller budget, than what they really needed. 

So in order to tackle that issue, they started reaching out more concretely with their faculty to say, this is the situation. This is what we have. What do you really need? What do you really want? And they gathered a bunch of statistics on usage, and spending. And then they used that to craft their budget request. And I think they maybe didn't get all of the money that they wanted. But they had a better outcome from their request, after they had done all this extra communication with faculty, and put more detail, and data into what they were providing to the Budget Office. 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: Historically, I think tech services departments have often preferred to remain behind the scenes. The work we do is very much front, and center. But we often want to rely on the work to speak for itself, to communicate our value for us. And there's been a growing trend, for years now, to move away from that, to be willing to speak up more a little bit about the work that we're doing, and how we bring value to an organization. I mean, this is for lots of reasons. It's decreasing budgets, and reduced staff, and that horrible phrase, do more with less. 

And so I think a lot of the chapters, as the Tricia was outlining, are stories of ways in which various departments have figured out how to communicate their value to whoever their audience was, depending on the chapter. Whether it's colleagues within the technical services department, or the people in the library as a whole, or somebody in the larger community. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: We'll be back with more about Telling the Technical Services Story, after a music set. 

INTERVIEWER 1: File this set under BF1091.S75. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

(SINGING) Last night, I had a wonderful dream about you. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

INTERVIEWER 2: You just heard "Dreaming," by The Cosmic Rays with Sun Ra and the Arkestra. And before that, "A Wonderful Dream," by The Majors. Those were songs about dream scenarios. 

MARLEE GIVENS: This is Lost in the Stacks, and we're back with Kimberley Edwards and Trisha Mackenzie, co-editors of the recent book, Telling the Technical Services Story. In the last segment, we talked about their inspiration for the book and the idea that projects are all about communication. For this segment, we ask Kim and Trisha about the process of putting the book together. 

TRISHA MACKENZIE: We put out the calls for proposals, and then we've got so many submissions. I think it was 78 submissions, and that was all very exciting, and then we had to sit down and read all 78 submissions. And many of them were-- I mean, well, they were all very good, but some, it became difficult making decisions. 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: Yeah, I completely agree with Tricia. I think that was the hardest part is figuring out how to winnow it down to the chapters we selected, but being technical services librarians, we made a list, we made a chart. We would have assigned numbers to various things. So yeah, we ended up just deciding to create a little bit of scoring system based on what section of the book it would fall into and what type of library and what area and tech services maybe they would fall into. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah, with this being an edited volume, collection of case studies written by different authors at different libraries, what was your process of taking these many different articles and making one coherent book? 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: For me, that's the most fun part. It's like a puzzle. And the very first part of that is selecting the chapters that you want to include, and it was very much a case of be careful what you wish for because it's never great if you don't have enough to select from because it's harder to piece together the entire whole, but we have the complete opposite problem. Once we had a chance to sit down and really talk about in our dream scenario, what would this book contain. And then we were able to very carefully pick the chapters that we thought would fit, not only within our idea for the book, but also how they would fit together, what chapter might help strengthen another chapter, how well they would feed off of each other. 

And I think that's a really great part of getting to be an editor of a book like this. Every single chapter is something new, is something that we as editors are getting to learn from and develop our own ideas and our own. So essentially, that was a very rambling way of saying that thank you, both because I think we learned from your fellow authors. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Did any of the proposals change how you were thinking about the book? 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: I feel like we went in trying to have as little concrete expectation as possible simply because-- and again, Tricia, correct me if I'm wrong-- but I think we were hoping that the chapters themselves would help shape the book. 

TRISHA MACKENZIE: Yes. 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: And there were certainly chapters that surprised the heck out of me. Like there is one about marketing and about how the work that is done in technical services ties perfectly into theories of marketing. And not only had that never occurred to me, but it never would have occurred to me to even hope for a chapter like that because those are not things I would connect in my brain in a million years, and there that chapter was. And it came in, and I thought, well, OK, then. This is a great chapter. 

And I think so many of them were like that. It was things that projects that people had done that I would never have thought of or approaches to projects that never would have occurred to me. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Tricia, did you have any surprises? 

TRISHA MACKENZIE: Yes, the one that really surprised me because on the surface, I thought, what is this going to be? That's a project on organizing legacy documentation. And you just read that, and you just think, this is going to be kind of dry. It will be useful, but it's kind of dry. But when you read the chapter, I mean, the authors, their approach was very practical and very easy to understand. It would be very easy to implement, and their workflow for looking at the documentation as a whole and how they wanted to organize it and also thinking about how documentation had changed over the course of years and staffing, changes and everything and how that really played into the muckiness that they had on their intranet. And how it complicated things, not only for library staff, but also because of the way their system was set up. 

If someone did a free text search of the discovery layer for, I don't know, something like specific call member and that specific call member happened to show up in a piece of the cataloging department's documentation, then a patron is going to get, like this is how we label for the music library or something like that. So they broke it down in a really great way. They looked at different systems for how they wanted to present the information. 

And so instead of just having a bunch of PDFs, they looked at different systems for display and came up with a standardized form for creating documentation. And I was just amazed, and I thought, oh, my God, I really want to implement this for my department, and I think our technical services department could. So I guess this is my rambling. I'm just saying information about documentation can be kind of cool and interesting. I don't know, maybe that's just me. I'm a cataloger. What can I say? 

MARLEE GIVENS: And with that, the chapter, the thing that surprised me, I think, the most about that chapter is it was fun to read. 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: Check in about documentation are not supposed to be fun to read. That's not the way documentation works. But it was. It was great. 

TRISHA MACKENZIE: Right. So really, Kim, you should have just said that because I was framed. Yeah, but it was fun to read. 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: [INAUDIBLE] 

TRISHA MACKENZIE: Yes, and you could can get a sense of the author's personality. Somehow that managed to come out and the way that they were collaborated well together. And so yeah, it was just a great chapter. 

FRED RASCOE: You're listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll be back with more from Kimberley Edwards and Trisha Mackenzie on the left side of the hour. 

WAYNE CLOUGH: Hi, this is Wayne Clough, president emeritus of Georgia Tech and secretary emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK, Atlanta. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called Telling the Technical Services Story, named after the book co-edited by our guests, Kimberley Edwards and Tricia Mackenzie. And so I have a story for you inside another story. Michael Gorman, whose career includes head of cataloging at the British National Bibliography, head of the Office of Bibliographic Standards in the British Library, director of technical services at the University of Illinois Library, and President of the American Library Association, used to write a column for American Libraries called "Toward Bibliographic Control." 

Now, putting aside that that should be a band name and another show, I want to tell you about one of those columns entitled, "On Doing Away with Technical Services Departments," which was published in 1979 in which he told this story. 

"And it came to pass that when Cutta the book God had made the first library, she saw that it was good. She called the librarians together and divided them as a herder divides the sheep and goats. To the first group, she spoke saying, 'You shall dwell in the light and serve the readers, and your glory shall be great.' Then she turned to the second group and spoke saying, 'You shall dwell in the darkness. Secrets shall be your ways and hidden, your practices. You shall not know the public, neither shall any reader know you. Go forth and classify.' So it has been to this day." 

Let's file this set under Z688.6.U6T45. 

MARLEE GIVENS: That was "Dusting Morning," bye Birdie. Before that, we heard "Bits and Pieces," by the Dave Clark Five, songs about putting pieces together and the happy by products that result 

INTERVIEWER 2: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. Today we're speaking with Kimberley Edwards and Tricia Mackenzie, co-editors of the new book Telling the Technical Services Story, Communicating Value. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: What did you learn about technical services that you didn't know while working on this book? 

TRISHA MACKENZIE: Well, one thing for me that there was a chapter on doing retreats to bolster the feeling of teamwork and collaboration within a department, at least in cataloging. I mean, my goodness, I've got a wonderful team of very great people, but we're all introverted and shy, and having a departmental meeting, this is what's on the agenda. Any questions? And that's it. 

But when the chapter on retreats, the author explained these are some ideas, some ways to kind of bolster that sense of teamwork and camaraderie. And it seemed to be a really useful sort of a thing and really good for morale and everything. And they would have guests come from other departments. Maybe their dean came once or one of their associate university librarians. 

They managed to get the mascot of the university that comes to a lunch time. It just seems like great fun and completely out of the ordinary for a cataloging department to do. I just thought that is a really great idea, and maybe post pandemic and this new normal, that chapter will inspire some other folks to-- not just me, but just some other folks to do that sort of more teamwork kind of community-building activities. 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: When I read other people's books of edited chapters, what I often look for is little kernels of fate. Because you can't often take an entire project and adopt it into your library. You have to take the pieces of them that fit into your own library. I feel like a lot of us can find pieces in a lot of chapters, not just in this book, but in any edited book, pieces that are useful within your own library. 

And to use you all as an example, a lot of libraries are making that gradual slide into resources. Your library made the absolute-- well, to an outsider at least-- a terrifying decision to make a leap into all the resources and moving all of your physical collections offsite. E-resources are certainly on the rise, and print is generally going to be on the decline. 

And so somebody would be able to take a look at your chapter and say, OK, we aren't going to make the leap entirely into e-resources on site, and we aren't going to move our entire physical collection off site. But here are three projects that they did within their chapter to help make the e-resources transition smoother. Is there one or two or pieces of one or two that we might be able to adopt within our own library. 

So I mean, it's a little bit of a cop out because I'm not picking any single chapter, but for me, personally, when I read books, this stuff tends to be what I look for because I look for the little pieces that will fit within our own workflow. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: I want to go back to the question about stereotypes. You've said things just now. Trisha said technical services prefer to stay behind the scenes. There are all those little things that we always say and I think we don't even think about saying that. So tell us a few things. What stereotypes about technical services you hate and which ones I think are true and should just stay and we should continue communicating them as great things? 

KIMBERLEY EDWARDS: The one I think is slightly more true is that those of us who choose technical services as a career, anything and technical services, tends to be a little bit more on the introverted side of the scale. It's the nature of the work. You have to be willing to sit at a computer and stare at whatever your area is, whether it's mark records all day or order records and not need any sort of external communication with others in order to be happy in your job. 

And that's a stereotype I'm, frankly, 100% OK with. Because I think any healthy system, whether it's a workplace or anything else, works better when there's different people and different types of communication. And so I don't think that there's anything wrong at all with those of us in tech services maybe being slightly more introverted than others because I think we all bring different strengths to the table. 

I hate that there is any sort of implication that that makes us less strong, that we aren't bringing as much to the library community because we are maybe less willing to stand up and say, look at the great work we're doing. Because we are. We're doing great work, and maybe it's a little bit harder for us to wave our own flags around when we talk about it, but yeah, for me, that would be the loves and the hates. 

TRISHA MACKENZIE: Kim, I totally agree with you, and yes, I was the one who talked about the stereotype, but I myself am very much an introvert, but I also don't think that that's just across the board. There are plenty of extroverts that choose this type of work, but there are people who thrive on constant communication with others. And I think some of those folks do choose the public services side, where those of us who become exhausted by lots of interaction, cataloging or technical services, acquisitions, with a little less constant contact, that might be a more comfortable position. 

But again, I have had librarians and catalogers that I've worked with who are very extroverted, and I know public facing folks who are very introverted, and they make it work for them. But I also agree with Kim. What I hate about the stereotype, what I hate about technical services is that we are just not nearly as important as the public-facing folks. So we aren't the ones who are regularly working with faculty or doing instruction with students and all of that stuff, so this is sort of a little soapbox for me. 

But if we weren't there, if technical services wasn't there to order the books, pay the bills, describe the resources, deal with the licenses, and acquiring the e-resources and all of that stuff like, what could people get from the library? What could our patrons get from the library? To me, I feel like we are the backbone of any library. 

That is not to diminish at all subject librarians, public-facing people. We all make the library work. We all make access happen for our patrons, but we get looked over because we're in technical services. We're generally behind the scenes. I think that's the stereotype that I hate. Because I think we are all a piece of the whole, and we are all crucial to getting resources to our patrons. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Our guests today are Kimberley Edwards and Tricia Mackenzie of George Mason University Libraries, where Kim is the head of Database Integrity and Analysis and Trisha is the head of Metadata Services. They are co-editor of Telling the Technical Services Story, Communicating Value, just published by ALA Editions. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: File this set under BF698.35.I59C35. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: You just heard "A Strong Spinning," by Each Other and before that, "Tiger Rising," by Mary Timony, songs about quiet strength. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Quiet strength that's what we're calling introversion. Right, everybody? Today's show is called "Telling the Technical Services Story." And as we finish up, I have a question for each of you in the virtual studio. What part of your library department could use some better PR? What should people know more about. Sonya, as guest producer, why don't you start? 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Cataloging is not boring. That's what people know. 

AMEET DOSHI: Standards, which are cataloged and made accessible are really important. Turns out things fall apart when there aren't standards. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: No joke, I just came from a meeting with our communications manager about all the awesome PR we could do for archives, so super excited about that. But in general, a lot of archives is invisible, so it's great to get the word out. 

FRED RASCOE: I think we need to get the word out to students that a place like a library, the service, the spaces, the collection is only accessible to them for a short time. They graduate, and then they don't get the same access to it that they once had. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Those are all such good ones, but I'm just going to add to it and say I wish people knew more about the fact that we're pretty much just leasing our electronic resources and providing access to them, and they're really under the control of the people who are publishing them and producing them. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Gosh, I wish I had a way to sum it all up, but really I just want people to know more about how retractions work, and we can tell them about that. I had a very long conversation with someone about Andrew Wakefield that I do not want to relive any time soon. Roll the credits. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: "Lost in the Stacks" is a collaboration between WREK in Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Written and produced by Ameet Doshi, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hangenmaier. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Today's show was edited and assembled by Charlie in beautiful, but humid, Tucker, Georgia. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Legal counsel and the most entertaining documentation you've ever seen were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER Special Thanks to Kimberley and Tricia for being on the show, to Sonya for coming back to Lost in the Stacks, as the co-producer, and thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. 

MARLEE GIVENS: You can find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show is a rerun, and after that, who knows what might happen. I mean, July is just crazy around here. 

AMEET: It's time for our last song today, and we return to the music theme that started us off. To really tell the technical services story in a library requires having many skills, but perhaps the most important of all is the ability to communicate. So let's close with "Communicate," by Alfie Silas right here on "Lost in the Stacks." Have a great weekend, everybody.