Do you ever find yourself stuck in the routine work of librarianship in a way that makes you uncomfortable or frustrated? On this show Dr. Darin Freeburg, Associate Professor, and Katie Klein, Doctoral Student in Library and Information Science, in the College of Information and Communications at the University of South Carolina, share information about research they’ve been doing on problematic routines in libraries. They share what they’ve learned about what can cause these problems and reflect on the possibilities for creating workplaces free from the challenges of problematic routines.
Contact info for Dr. Freeburg: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/cic/faculty-staff/freeburg_darin.php
Transcript
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Adriane Herrick Juarez:
This is Adriane Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
Do you ever find yourself stuck in the routine work of librarianship in a way that makes you uncomfortable or frustrated? On this show Doctor Darin Freeburg, Associate Professor, and Katie Klein, Doctoral Student in Library and Information Science in the College of Information and Communications at the University of South Carolina, share information about research they’ve been doing on problematic routines in libraries. They share what they’ve learned about what can cause these problems, and reflect on the possibilities for creating workplaces free from the challenges of problematic routines. Enjoy the show!
Darin and Katie, welcome to the show.
Darin Freeburg:
Good to be here.
Katie Klein:
Thank you.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: Thank you both for being here today. Will you talk about rethinking problematic routines? As we begin, I’m curious how you got involved in researching this topic. 01:38
Darin Freeburg:
Thanks for asking about this. When we tell people that we study work routines, you can see their eyes glaze over a little bit because routine work sounds inherently boring, but I’ve been interested in, just generally, in the workplace for a while now—mostly just because of how much time we spend there. I like to remind my students that if you work from the age of twenty to the age of sixty-five, you’ll spend over 90,000 hours of your life at work, for ten entire years.
Once you get over how incredibly depressing that sounds, even if it’s a job that you love, it reveals just how important that part of our lives is. It also reinforces how much of a burden it is when you don’t like what you do, when the workplace is unfair, when you’re treated poorly, when you aren’t respected. Many of those burdens and problems show up in routine work, the stuff we do repetitively on a regular basis.
Most people can easily rattle off several of the routine parts of their day. What we’re seeing is that the unfairness, the poor treatment, the lack of respect, whatever it is, becomes part of the routine. As that routine is repeated over and over again, those burdens are essentially normalized. They’re standardized, and ultimately they’re hidden. What we’re trying to do with this project is to bring these routines to the surface so that we can ask some questions of them. We’ve been lucky enough to receive some very generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to be able to do that.
Katie Klein:
I guess what I would add is—I’m really interested in libraries. I’ve been a librarian for my whole career. I went to library school right after college. I really am invested in libraries, and that’s why I’m working on my PhD in Library Science to make libraries better. I’m really excited to be able to look at the everyday work of libraries and make that better.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: And hopefully by examining this, that’s what it does. It makes the work better. Will you describe how blueprints for routines are developed in work systems? 04:07
Darin Freeburg:
Martha Feldman and Brian Pentland—we rely on their work in routine dynamics for a lot of what we’re doing. They use a sheet music metaphor that I think is really helpful. If you think of a set of musicians playing from a set of sheet music—notes printed on a page that tell them here’s how the music is supposed to go, here’s what it’s supposed to sound like. That’s the blueprint. Workplaces, like libraries, have lots of sheet music that workers are supposed to follow, right? Here’s how this routine should be done. This sheet music is based on things we’ve done in the past, based on what we’re trying to do right now. Sometimes it’s written very explicitly. Other times it’s more of a vague sense of the way we do things around here—I’m using air quotes, but you can’t see that on a podcast.
But, notes on a page don’t contain everything that you need to know in order to play that music. No two musicians will interpret those blueprints in the exact same way, right? Anytime you listen to music, those musicians are bringing their own flavor to the composition. They’re interpreting the sheet music, maybe even improvising a little bit.
The exact same thing is true about routines at work. You’ve got blueprints that are a guide, but they can’t tell you everything. In practice, workers always are straying a little bit from those blueprints. They have agency, they improvise. The important thing for us is the impact of those improvisations and the extent to which they lead to actual changes in the sheet music. Are we listening to the improvisations and maybe rewriting the music, rewriting the routine blueprints based on that? Are we rewriting the musical score of library work, so to speak, in ways that are more equitable, that overcome some of these problematic things that we’ve been finding?
Katie Klein:
Sometimes it seems a little bit like library work is a series of wicked problems rather than routines, because every patron will have different questions, and they’ll come up to the desk with their own stuff, their own baggage, their own personality, their own way of asking questions. So it is sort of a wicked problem, but also you as a worker have the same ways that you approach these things.
Sometimes that’s very prescribed on how you’re supposed to do it—how you’re supposed to conduct a research interview. Do you do that following that script, or how much do you improvise? Even things that are super routine, like shelving books. People do that in their own way too. They might rearrange the cart first. They might do more of a go-around the library. You might do your section first. It all depends on a lot of things. It could even depend on the day. Is there a program happening in that room? So, I need to not shelve the children’s books until after the program’s over. All of that stuff comes into it, and in some ways, the more we empower workers to make those improvisations can make a big difference in library work.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: How do routines cause barriers in the workplace? 07:38
Darin Freeburg:
Our perspective on these blueprints—on this sheet music for routines is that, yes, they tell you how all of these different things in the library should be done, but they do more than that. They also suggest who you should be as you do those things and what that means. That’s where we are seeing the most significant problems. When the quote, unquote way we do things around here gets shifted to, Here’s who we are around here. It doesn’t take too much digging into previous research or statistics in the library workforce to know that the answers to who library staff should be center around all of those typical standards for normal, the stuff that we see in broader society, things around race, ability, sexuality, mental health.
You could look at so much work in that. You could look at the work of April Hathcock, Kaetrena Davis Kendrick. Here at the University of South Carolina, you can look at the work of Nicole Cooke and Mónica Colón-Aguirre. We know that the further away you are from that normal—the more these blueprints, the more this sheet music for who you should be, becomes really, really problematic.
Williamson wrote about the pressures on BIPOC library staff who feel the need to hide parts of themselves, parts of who they are in order to stay in the career— to remain viable in a library career. We know that similar pressures are leading LGBTQIA+ staff to hide who they are, or staff with disabilities to not ask for really essential accommodations, because basically who you are doesn’t fit the sheet music for that work.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: Are there solutions for performing routines that shift problematic standards and expectations? 09:46
Katie Klein:
People are making up solutions every day. The question is, do we know what those solutions are? Are we turning them into best practices? There’s a lot of different ways to react. There are ways to deal with things like tone-policing and microaggressions, but sometimes people need training to help empower themselves to do that. They need the kind of atmosphere in their library, the kind of work culture that will let them be who they are, make the changes that they need to make—be supported when they need to be supported.
There are solutions out there, but I don’t think that we have them written down yet. I think that’s part of what our research is going to do, especially in the workshops that we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be asking people to help us write down what are these solutions, what are best practices around these kinds of situations?
Darin Freeburg:
I think Katie’s spot on here. Basically what we’re trying to do is listen to how library staff are playing the music so that we can rewrite that music, because we know as Katie said, staff don’t have to play the music as written. They can improvise. And those improvisations are often much, much better than the original score. So we are trying to listen to how they are playing the music.
We used to think that routine work just made workplaces super stuck in the same old thing every day, but it’s because of these two elements of routines—the blueprints, but also the ability to improvise when you perform those blueprints, that suggests that actually routines can be a tremendous source of of change and increasing equity and fairness in the workplace. And, so that’s why we’re looking at them.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: So what are some things that libraries can do to support the kind of thing you’re talking about? 11:53
Darin Freeburg:
I love this question. I think it’s probably the most important question of all of this. I say that staff don’t have to play the music as written, that they can improvise. But on the flip side, workers shouldn’t have to rely on constant improvisation. The music should just be written for them. And so this is a matter of taking seriously staff concerns about work routines and working with them to meaningfully rewrite those routines.
Really all of the pressure is off of Katie and I, because we don’t come into this knowing what to do. In many ways, we have no idea what to do about any of the things that we’re finding. Katie and I represent a lot of the normal that is expected of library staff. So our goal, and the next steps in this is we will be holding a series of workshops across the country. We’re going to start this in the Fall/Winter of this year.
As a quick plug, if you’re listening to this please consider hosting one of these workshops. Basically, we’re going to overview the things that we’ve been finding about these problematic blueprints, this problematic sheet music. Then we’ll guide attendees, staff, and management in a series of very hands-on activities where they’re going to critique how things currently are. They’re going to dream of a future where none of these problems exist, and then they’re going to come back and come up with a concrete plan for actually achieving that dream. So, the answer to that question is to be determined. We will find the answers from staff themselves.
Katie Klein:
Can I just add—a lot of it has to do with empathy, though. I think that a lot of the problems that we’re coming up with that people are telling us about are a lack of empathy from management, from the higher levels. There’s just structurally built-in points where even if the manager wants to be able to give someone a day off, wants to be able to give them accommodations, wants to be able to step in and tell the patron who’s harassing them to stop. Sometimes the system just is built to not let them do those things, even if they want to. That’s where policies have to change. That’s where as a profession we have to change, to put not just patrons first, but also our workers, because a lot of people are telling us that their customer service is their very top thing, and that means that they’re sacrificing their own well-being, sometimes, in order to meet those customer service standards.
What was it that one of our advisory teams was telling us about? The customer service mantra? The customer always comes first. It actually has another part, which is the customers…
Darin Freeburg:
…yeah, the customers are always right. I think the second part…
Katie Klein:
…in matters of taste. Yes. So, the customer is always right in matters of taste, not they’re always right across the board. They’re not always right when they don’t follow safety policies. They’re not always right when they’re abusing library workers. And we need to make sure that when we’re training library workers, that they know that they don’t have to take that abuse.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: That’s important to distinguish. And Darin, you mentioned that there’s an opportunity as you take a deeper dive into your research for others to get involved in workshops, to bring some of this to light. If someone wanted to do that, how would they reach out to you? 15:44
Darin Freeburg:
They can reach out to us via email. I don’t know if you will be able to link—and there are lots of different ways that they can participate. They can be a participant in one of our studies. They can host one of the workshops. We’re also inviting people to submit ideas for blogs about this kind of stuff that we’ll host on the website. So check out the website, or reach out to us via our email would be the best way to do that.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: Thank you. And we can definitely link that in the show notes. So for our listeners, you can check out the post of this episode on our website at Library Leadership Podcast.com. If you want to get involved. What would you recommend for anyone wishing to develop a plan for realizing a workplace free from the challenges of problematic routines? 16:29
Darin Freeburg:
A lot of that is going to be based on the particular identities of the staff in a particular library. But I do think, generally, I’d say be proactive in your attempts to learn what staff are actually experiencing. Even some of the things that are super, super minor. We have this sense that in order to talk about our experiences it has to be important enough. So, we often don’t talk about the general things that are frustrating, that make work not super fun in many ways.
I would say be proactive in reaching out and letting staff know that you want to know about their experiences. The other part of that is proactively implementing support structures that don’t require staff to come and ask for them—especially again, because many of these things might seem minor. A lot of staff are not saying anything. They’re not bringing up these issues either because it seems minor, or because they’ve brought it up in the past and nothing happened. It’s hard for some staff to bring these things up. It’s going to be really important. That’s part of what we’re doing in this research is being the voice, in some ways, or sharing the experiences of staff with other libraries who can then take that and implement things at their library without their staff asking for it.
Katie Klein:
I think it’s also really important to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk on DEI stuff. I think there are still a lot of people who think, Oh, we have a committee, we’re doing everything we need to be doing. And, they’re not. They’ve got to take it seriously. This profession has a diversity problem. We know that. We need our staffs to look more like the communities that they serve. We need to make real efforts to make that change. It’s not enough to have one person on the staff who speaks Spanish if you have a big Spanish speaking community around you. It’s not enough to say that you have equal opportunities, but then you think maybe it would be too hard to hire someone who couldn’t walk up and down the stairs. You just have to be honest and really, really do the work.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: Thank you both for that. Is there anything else you’d like to share? 19:37
Darin Freeburg:
I think it’s really important to point out that because work routines have these two components, the blueprints and the performance of the blueprint—the sheet music and the performance of the sheet music, it’s very easy to hide any inequities that are happening in routine work. Because, the blueprints—the sheet music themselves will rarely make something like discrimination super explicit. The blueprints will rarely directly instruct workers to discriminate. But the way that the blueprint is put into practice, the way the sheet music is performed, can absolutely still be discriminatory, even if the sheet music isn’t explicitly discriminatory.
But then when you call that discrimination out, when you say, Hey, wait a second, the organization brings out the blueprints and says, what are you talking about? Ostensibly, the routine is not at all about discrimination. There’s nothing in this sheet music about how this work goes that is discriminatory. So what are you talking about?
There was a study a couple years ago by Diamond and Lewis, and they looked at the disciplinary routines in schools. The blueprints for those routines were not explicitly discriminatory, but the way they were put into practice unfairly targeted black students. The school hid behind the blueprints to say, Everything is fine. What are you talking about? There’s so many ways in which these issues are very subtly hidden. That is another reason why we need to constantly be bringing them to the surface and talking about them.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: And that’s why we’re talking about it today. So I’m glad you’re here. Do you have any favorite leadership books or resources and why? 21:33
Katie Klein:
I have found the most useful resources are experiences rather than just a book. I mean, I love reading. I’m a librarian. I would not say don’t read leadership books, but I would say that it’s much more impactful to find some classes, find some kind of program. I did Project SET at the Massachusetts Library System while I was there, and that was fantastic. It’s a huge leadership development program. A lot of the people who went through that were able to make the step up to management or a director position. And, I do it in a different way. I went back to school to work on my PhD, but it was a good opportunity to rethink your position in libraries, what you’re looking for in the world, and to try and open some doors that way. I think that those kind of experiences are much more impactful for me.
Darin Freeburg:
You’ve asked the question that professors love to answer and always have a response for, even when they know that the people on the receiving end of that may not even ever read anything that they suggest in a syllabus. A few things that I would suggest along these lines to get a better sense of some of the subtle things that library staff are experiencing. Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, including her book The Managed Heart.
I’d also recommend a book by James Sussman called, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. I think it’s really helpful to understand that we haven’t always thought of work like we do right now. Many of the things that we take for granted like resource scarcity, survival of the fittest, even the 40-hour work week are things that we all made up relatively recently in the history of humanity. And, many of these things don’t particularly work well.
Cal Newport’s book on Deep Work takes a similar approach arguing that the current way that we organize work isn’t actually working because it’s filled with all these shallow tasks. I think generally, that libraries have a huge opportunity to help the rest of the country rethink the nature of work, particularly post-COVID, when these conversations are being had everywhere. I think libraries have a huge opportunity to be leaders in this area and rethink the very nature and structure of work itself.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: Darin and Katie, in closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 24:28
Katie Klein:
I’m one of those people who still has some vocational awe left, so librarianship has been a calling for me. I strongly believe in libraries. I believe in it as an important part of democracy. I believe in school libraries. I was a school librarian for a long time. Libraries are so essential and we just have to live up to the promise. I think that we’re at a bit of a crossroads right now with all of the technology development and where we’ve been trying to figure out what’s our place in social services. We have a lot of decisions to make, and we need to be really clear about what we are, what we do, and what we don’t do, and communicate that well with the world—especially our own communities.
What is it that your library is going to do for your community? What are you willing to do? How can you help them and where can you not? Because, we’re really good at giving people other resources as well. But the public shouldn’t have to come to the public library expecting that we’re going to do their taxes and then be sent somewhere else. They should know the library doesn’t do my taxes, but I could go to the library, or I could call the library and ask them where I can get my taxes done for free.
It’s those kinds of things. What social services do we actually provide, and when are we going to tell people to go somewhere else? There’s that disconnect in the communication of what libraries are doing right now. We have to figure out for ourselves because it varies from system to system too on how far you can go—what resources you have available.
If we’re going to provide all of the resources that we ideally want to, then we need a lot more funding than we’re currently getting. Part of that buy-in to get that funding, is communicating clearly what we can do. There’s a lot of communication that needs to happen. And frankly, a lot of work. But librarians—we’re in there for the work. We’re going to do it. But I think that we need to do a little better with getting in line, so we all know what work we’re really doing.
Darin Freeburg:
Katie brought up that notion that we’re all familiar with, vocational awe. I always want to be careful to express my feelings about libraries without furthering that sense of vocational awe. It’s a weird time. It’s very easy for me to say, Libraries are the last bastion of freedom and the fight for democracy, right? But, I mean, the truth is that libraries are absolutely fundamental pieces of the social and civic fabric, particularly now. They’re filling in gaps where other institutions and other organizations are either unable to engage or unwilling to engage. We’re seeing more and more of those pieces of the social and civic fabric falling away, which is going to place increasing pressure on libraries to fill in the gaps. At the same time, they cannot do everything. Library staff cannot be everything to everybody. And so I think, going back to what Katie is talking about—about being clear about what exactly libraries are, is going to be really, really important. And obviously, I say that libraries are super important. I just wish that their pay reflected that.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Katie, I’ll just say you’re a doctoral student in library science. I’ve been in the field for a long time, but I still feel some of that vocational awe. On certain days my heart is just soaring because I get to do this work. That said, we have to pay our people for it. We have to know what we can and can’t do, and we have to rethink problematic routines, which is why we’re here today talking about this. We don’t want the work to become a problem through blueprints that play routines without thought. I’m so glad you’re both doing this work, and I’m so glad we got to talk about it today. I hope some of our listeners will take the opportunity to get involved. Thank you.
Darin Freeburg:
Thank you so much for having us.
Katie Klein:
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right to your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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