[MUSIC PLAYING]
Martin, do you have a favorite bird?
I have a soft spot for Cardinals. I don't know why. They're just really pretty I love the bright red color that the male has. But I also think that the brownish, reddish coloring that the females have is also really striking. And I just think they're really sweet. I've heard that Cardinals, actually, the males, build songs to sing to their females. It's not the same song that another male might sing.
Like they intentionally craft a specific song for their mate and I just think that's really interesting.
You are listening to WREK Atlanta and this is Lost in the Stacks, the Research Library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with everybody. Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. 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.
This episode is called The Systems Librarian. Regular listeners of Lost in the Stacks have noticed that we've been hiring new faculty at the Georgia Tech Library all year and we've been introducing them to you as they arrive.
And our newest faculty member is Martin Patrick, the systems librarian. We spent some time with him talking about coding, systems, librarianship, and higher education.
And so our songs today are about empathy, the chaos of computer technology, and birds.
Birds?
Yeah. I think we're going to be learning a lot of different things from Martin today. Such as, the fact that he's from Minneapolis. So let's start with Something I Learned Today by one of Minneapolis's many music legends, the mighty Husker Du. Right here on Lost in the Stacks. That was something I learned today by Husker Du and this is Lost in the Stacks. And our show today is called The Systems Librarian.
I should have found a bird pun for the title.
Our guest is Martin Patrick, the newest member of the Georgia Tech Library faculty.
Martin, what's your actual title?
My title is systems librarian.
We've had a lot of titles recently that have been a little more expansive, have had like ins and outs, but yours is very straightforward. You are the librarian of the systems. So we don't have to get any more explanation of that at all, do we?
Nope. I think that covers it.
This is going to be an ironic interview. All right. What are the systems that we're talking about when you say you're the systems librarian?
So there are two primary systems that we use in the Georgia Tech Library. One is called Alma and one is called Primo. They are by the same vendor, which is great for us. And so the Alma side is the staff side. So when we buy things, when we catalog things, when we keep track of our physical inventory, when we keep track of our electronic inventory, that all happens in Alma. And Alma feeds that data directly into Primo.
And Primo is where our community of users interact with our resources and are able to discover material that will help them with their research, or their class papers, or whatever. And they can make requests on physical material, it can link them directly to electronic material. So those are the two primary systems that we use. But obviously, there are a lot of systems that libraries use for archives.
We get a lot of data from the campus, through the student information system, from the financial systems, we interact with the University System of Georgia, we interact with Emory very tightly and closely. So all of these systems have to integrate smoothly and efficiently. And so that's what my job is about, is making sure that that's happening. Making sure that there aren't obstacles to our staff and making sure that there are obstacles for our users.
So it's the computer systems? That's sort of the shorthand.
It's the compuer systems, yep.
And do you feel like an IT person or do you feel like a librarian who has to deal with IT?
I feel like a librarian. In my previous job at the University of Minnesota, I was in a IT position. I was classified as IT. And I was doing very similar work what I'm doing now. But in this role, I am defined as a librarian. I have faculty status, I have research and service responsibilities. And I think that's really important to me, because these systems that we use are computer systems. And so you would think that they're an IT product, but they're really a library product. Right?
They're designed by and for librarians and for library users. And so I think it's really important to have this kind of position that straddles the line between IT and librarianship. And I don't think it's not really so much about dealing with IT, as kind of liaison with it.
Do you feel like your position is reactive? We talked to electronic resources librarian a few shows ago. And one of the things she said was that she dealt with problems. Are you dealing with problems when things don't go smoothly or are you trying to make things work in different ways?
It's both. It's reactive and it's proactive. There's, with any complex system or piece of software, things are always going to go wrong. The vendor releases an update and it inadvertently causes a problem with some process that we're trying to do. For some reason, something in Primo that our users are interacting with isn't working right. And that could be a dozen problems, which Anew probably talked about with you. And so part of it is reacting to things as you become aware of them.
But also, part of it is being proactive about it and paying attention to the release notes. Our vendor is very good at letting us know what's coming down the pike in updates. And so looking at things and being like, oh this is going to really affect one of the workflows that our technical services folks are using. I need to let them know that this is coming. We need to think about how we're going to adjust and adapt to this change. Or seeking out ways to make things better.
I've submitted a couple of things already since I've been here to the vendor. Asking, is there a way that we can do this? And if not, can we make sure that it gets into the enhancement cycle? Which is one of the great things about our vendor. They are contractually obligated to make enhancements to the system every year, based on the community's votes. And so you're able to submit all kinds of requests for things to work differently or to work better to them.
And if it makes it in, then they have to do it. CHARLIE BENNETT: At your last job, you said you were considered IT staff, rather than just librarians. So here as a librarian, you're doing all of that systems work, that system maintenance, reactive and proactive. But then also, you've got the responsibilities, as you mentioned, scholarship and service. Was that something that you were looking to add?
Is that why you looked to get out of IT and into librarianship, to add that scholarship and service component? MARTIN PATRICK: Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the big reasons why this position was super attractive to me. Part of it is, this is the first librarian position I've been in that has promotion opportunities. Right? In my IT position, I was classified as class three, whatever it was. And that was it. There was no way to move up to four.
There was a four, but there was no process to actually move up. And here, because it's a promotion eligible position, I'm able to do the scholarship that I'm interested in. To serve on committees and stuff like that I'm interested in and work towards getting to the next level. And I think that having the opportunity to work towards getting to the next level is something that I'm really excited about.
To be clear, I should say, non librarians can do scholarship and service. Just like if you have a librarian position it's like built into your job description. Whereas, if you're in IT, it's a struggle to kind of find time to do that, without doing it on your own time.
It is. Yeah.
I have a kind of a philosophical question. I feel like your position, you're going to be straddling a line between making things better for our users and making things better for us, who work in the library. Does it feel like that to you? Or do you feel like whatever's good for one, is good for the other?
I mean, I think the systems are so tightly integrated I think that it's difficult to suss out. If we do something that makes the staff workflows better, is that not going to have an effect on the end users searching for resources? I think it might not always, but it often will. But I mean you're right. There is this tension between who are we going to focus our time on? And fortunately, at Georgia Tech, we have a fair number of people who work on these systems alongside me.
And so we can kind of divide and conquer the responsibility. So right now, I'm really focused on the Alma side of things for our staff users. Because we have a couple of people who are really good at the Primo side of things right now and are keeping up with that. So I don't have to spend as much time focused on that. Ultimately, it's just going to be kind of an ebb and flow kind of thing.
There are going to be issues that come up on the end user side, there are going to be issues that come up on the staff user side. And just trying to find the balance between those two things. I don't think they're in competition with each other, necessarily. But obviously, there's only so many people. There's only so many hours of time that we can devote to anything. So at some point, it's possible that we would have to decide who to privilege with our resources.
And my philosophy would be to always privilege the end user if we have to make a choice.
We'll be back with more from Martin after a music set.
File this set under QR 76.76.344 So I made a list of objects.
You just heard Computer Song by Jim Noir. And we started that set with No Computers by Rank Strangers. Those were songs about trying to overcome the chaos technology sometimes causes.
Sometimes. This is Lost in the Stacks and our guest today is Martin Patrick, the systems librarian at the Georgia Tech Library.
Since we were talking about it a little bit ago, Martin, just in the past, you mentioned that you have done some research or service in the field. And I'm just curious, what those areas of interest have been in the past for you, in terms of research and scholarship?
Yeah. So in the past, I focused on library automation and data, metadata analysis stuff. I gave several presentations with my colleague at the University of Minnesota. And we wrote a paper on how to do, what we call, metadata analysis. Which is basically looking at library metadata in huge quantities. Like hundreds of thousands, millions of records. Using tools, using Python, and using some of the libraries within Python, like Pandas, which is a data analysis package.
I've also done some research and presentations on electronic resources troubleshooting. And also, a little bit with authority control work. Which is not something I'm interested in any longer. But it has come up in my job.
So can you tell us your path to librarianship? I mean, did you start with IT? Did you start with librarianship? You have this sort of entanglement. How did you get here?
When I was in college, I felt like I wanted to be a professor. In that area, my interests are in the ancient Near East. So Babylon, Acadia, ancient Israel, Egypt, et cetera. The way that I saw that playing out was to go to a seminary and get an M.A. Degree in Hebrew. And then from there, get a PhD. Unfortunately, I timed it such that the economy crashed while I was finishing my master's degree.
And if you can believe it, all of the programs that I was looking at for PhD didn't have the money to continue having PhD students at that time. And so they just straight up stopped accepting applications for PhD programs. And so I graduated with this M.A. In Hebrew and didn't know what to do. So I tried to think about what would be a reasonable fit for me. And I felt like maybe libraries were, so I put out a couple of applications to public libraries.
And got a position as a part time circulation clerk. And they offered tuition remission for studying library. the master of library science degree. And that is what ultimately put me on the track into libraries, in general. What put me on the systems librarian track was when I had my first post-MLIS job. I spent a lot of time dealing with library automation and macros to help cataloging staff catalog materials more efficiently.
So macros are little programs that run on the computer that automate repetitive things, like clicking or typing. And so doing that work really got me interested in the system side of things, the programming side of librarianship. And so I've been intentionally kind of trying to find positions that get me there. And so the position I took at the University of Minnesota was kind of the stepping stone to try to get me into a role like this one.
Because it was much-- it was IT, obviously, and it was much more focused on that kind of work. It was focused on systems configuration, systems administration, programming and development of scripts that do things that the system necessarily can't do on its own. And that is what led me to this position.
I want to backtrack just a little bit. Can you expand on that moment when you were sort of trying to figure out, in a time of crisis, when you were saying to yourself, what career or what area am I going to go for? What did librarianship or libraries, specifically, how did they compel you?
I think the reason that I wanted to be a professor in the first place was that I've always been attracted to the education side of things. I was a music major in college. I was specifically focused on music business at the time. But I had this tension between music education and music business. And I've always been interested in helping people learn, helping people grow.
And so that was what really attracted me about being a professor, was the opportunity to continue to do that in a field that I was really interested in intellectually. And so I think for libraries, I see it kind of as the same thing. Right? Like my position helps staff here do their job better, which helps our users here do their research better for their papers, for their grants, for their general whatever research projects that they're working on.
And so to me, librarianship is the opportunity to work with people who are doing research and helping them connect to the resources that they need. And at a place like Georgia Tech especially, a lot of that research is really cutting edge. It's going to make the world a better place, hopefully. And ultimately, that's, to me, that's what education is all about. And so that's what I think I saw in librarianship, all those years ago.
Even though I didn't really understand where that would land me in 2022.
Do you have strong feelings either way when you're thinking about systems in libraries serving the academic community? Do you have strong feelings about using proprietary vendor infrastructure versus open source and maintaining that infrastructure in house?
I do have strong feelings about this. To me, it's a question of resource allocation. So if we go with the proprietary systems, we end up paying a hefty fee and subscription costs to a vendor. But that vendor has the knowledge and the institutional memory of the system. And when things are broken or when things need to be fixed or made better, they have teams of people who can do that. If we go down the route of open source which, philosophically, I love the concept of open source.
But when it comes to production environment like us, we can go down that route, but we have to still make up that development gap. We have to have people who can build it out, who can enhance it, who can fix the things that are broken. And that means that we have to hire a bunch of people to do that. And so at the end of the day, do you take the risk of hiring people who may work for us for a year and then leave? And then hiring somebody who works for us for six months and then leaves?
And then hiring somebody who works for us for two years and then leaves? Or do you take the risk of paying more in subscription costs and getting a company that's going to be stable? And while their development team may turn over, they're still going to have that institutional memory. And they're going to make sure that it works because their company relies on the income from the subscription fees.
And I think having that reliance is something that the open source community has always struggled with. Having that stability. What we're trying to do is so complex here. There are so many things that need to work right, that it's better, in my opinion, it's better to pay the proprietary vendor for the product that works really well, than to try to build something in-house.
But that creates a little bit of conflict for you because ideally, you want to go open source.
Exactly. Yes. There's a lot of burden on the user of the open source product that libraries just don't have the resources to manage effectively. And buy resources to manage effectively, I mean money to pay people to do things. And so I do have a philosophical tension with it. But at the end of the day, I do prefer the proprietary products that are out on the market for library management platforms right now.
You're listening to Lost in the Stacks and we'll be back with more from Martin Patrick about systems librarianship on the left side of the hour.
This is the king of town I have no business being on the radio but you're Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. It's my big break.
Our show today is called The Systems Librarian, featuring Martin Patrick, the new systems librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. Whenever we do an interview, there are questions that don't quite fit the main subject, but still seem important in some way. And I'd like to highlight one of those here Fred asked Martin about, well, I'll let Fred tell it.
Birdwatching. I like watching birds in my backyard. Because my brain, when I had kids, and a house in the suburbs, my brain just liked to, oh, we we're in this situation now. OK. Well, we like watching birds in the bird feeder now. So it's like a switch in my brain. There was nothing I was interested in as a younger person. You have a gorgeous photograph collection. You go out and photograph birds. You've contributed to backyard bird counts. Can you talk a little bit about how you got into that?
And how is it going to change now that you're in Georgia, rather than Minnesota?
I don't know how I got into it. You know, it's funny that you ask that. There was a meme that was going around Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Basically saying, at some point in your 30s, some switch in your brain flips and all of a sudden you're obsessed with birds.
That happened to me. That's exactly what happened.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's what happened to me too. Like I don't know. I just I remember when I was a kid, that we had Blue Jays in the backyard and I thought they were really interesting to watch. But it wasn't until, I don't know, just a few years ago that, all of a sudden, I was just like, oh, you know birds are really cool. That's so interesting look. At these little dinosaurs running around my backyard. And I've always been interested in photography.
And those two things intersected and just found the hobby that was the perfect hobby for me. Well obviously, the biggest thing that's going to change about being in Georgia instead of Minnesota is being able to go out in mid-October and wear a shirt sleeves instead of a sweater. I'm sure it's probably snowing in Minnesota right now today. And being able to go out in the winter and not have to put on six layers and snowshoes to go see what the winter birds are up to.
And there's also just different species of birds that exist here. Whether they're migrating through or live here year round that aren't in Minnesota. I think there's a lot of opportunities to find new birds that I didn't know existed. And to be out more of the year, trying to do that.
I'm so glad that being a middle aged person interested in birds is a meme. My kids just talk to me and nothing but memes and things that they hear on TikTok. And I have no idea what they're talking about. It's like, hey, I'm part of the meme culture, kids.
That's right
File this set under BF575.E55E45.
You just heard What's so Funny about Peace, Love, and Understanding by Sharon van Etten and Josh Homme. And before that, I for You and You for Me by the Decemberists. Songs about empathy and finding a path to a common understanding.
Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. We're talking with Martin Patrick, the systems librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. MARLEE GIVENS: I'm curious about, since you talked about scripting and like the project with Python, massive library data or metadata. Like what your experience has been using some open source tools on the periphery or to support, perhaps, a proprietary data that's stored in a proprietary system. So Python, for example, being the open source tool there.
Like do you think it's still possible to sort of utilize both directions at once in terms of scripting or other work to improve the metadata that's in the proprietary system? And do you see that continuing going forward in your work?
Yeah, absolutely. The great thing about open source is that it is so extensible and the community can really create things that fill niche needs in a lot of cases. For instance, Python has a library called "pymarc" and MARC is the content and encoding standard that most libraries use for cataloging library materials. So pymarc is kind of a pun on "Python" and "MARC." And so that tool really opens up a lot of possibilities for working with data in batches.
And when you combine that with our library system's APIs, we're able to do quite a bit beyond what the system has built in to do. And so I think there is the tension between, do we go open source or do we go proprietary? But with tools like Python, you can use the open-source community's development skills in those areas to enhance the proprietary system.
It sounds like your job is somewhat similar to your academic interests in that it's a variety of seemingly unconnected things all coming together in a single node. Do you have a hard time prioritizing each piece of your professional identity? Do you see a linkage to everything that maybe someone like me is missing? How do you feel about that multifarious position?
It's always hard to prioritize competing demands of your time, no matter what position you're in. In this one, I have competing demands from internal users, external users, University System of Georgia, Emory. And the system's librarianship is kind of niche and, at the same time, expansive. There are a lot of opportunities then to find avenues to connect the dots because one specific thing, like writing a Python script that does this one really specific thing, turns itself into a presentation.
And then you see someone else's presentation, and that turns into something that you bring back and do here that makes the work better. So I think really, at the end of the day, it's a conversation within your position and your interests within yourself, that you have with yourself. And sometimes, it's really intensive in this one area and other stuff kind of falls by the wayside.
And then that stuff that fell by the wayside a few months ago suddenly becomes really important and this other stuff that you were just working on is done and you can move back into that other thing.
I have had roommates that were coders, straight up coders running servers and things like that. And it completely consumed them in a way that they were very happy to be consumed. Everything was about how to automate things, how to code things, how to make stuff work better. That's what they thought about all the time. Does that happen for you?
Definitely. The first real Python script that I wrote that did something important, it took me, I don't know, about three weeks. And it was really all I could think about. I was like-- I came in to the office, I sat down at my desk, and I started working on it. And all of a sudden, it was 5:00 and time to go home. And while I was at home, I was watching TV on the couch and thinking about, oh, maybe it needs to do this instead of that.
And something about it, something about the puzzle solving or the finding the right way to do something, it just really gets into you. And it's hard to let it go until it finally works. And I think people who are attracted to coding or programming tend to be that kind of people, who can't let something go until they get it to work right. So when something isn't working right, they have to fix it. It has to be work-- it has to work right.
And I don't know exactly what that drive comes from or where that drive comes from, but I've definitely felt it before when working on coding projects.
I have potentially a self-serving question. This is kind of related to the earlier conversation about how you got into librarianship, but I'm thinking about it as you're answering this question as well. To what extent do you feel like your background in music and languages is being put to use in your current position? And I say this as a language major myself.
[CHUCKLING]
Anybody who studies music or languages, I think there's one thing that happens, which is that you really start to see-- you really start to be more empathetic with other people, I think, is the end result. So when you study music, it's hard to study music without participating in some group ensemble. And so when you are 1 instrument among 4 or 1 instrument among 20, you have to learn how to exist and work with other people.
And I think when you study a language, you start to understand the world through a different lens. And when you study a modern language, like French or German, they way that the language is constructed is slightly different than the way English is constructed. We say things slightly differently. For instance, we say, "I miss you." In French, if you translate it literally, it's, "You are missed by me." And so it's just a slightly different way of seeing the world.
And I think studying languages opens you up to seeing how other people think and feel and interact with things. And I think, in both cases, you become more empathetic to other people. So to answer your question then, I think that how it helps me in my job is starting from a place of empathy with users and trying to not just say, well, this is the way the system works. You're just going to have to deal with it.
But saying so I understand that the system is getting in your way, let's think about how we might get around that. WENDY HAGENMAIER: We've been speaking with Martin Patrick, Systems Librarian at the Georgia Tech Library, and birdwatcher.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
File this set under QL-676.B938.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) So free, so free.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was Birds by Adrian Belew. And before that, you heard Little Birdie by Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops, songs about birds.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Our show today was called The Systems Librarian, featuring our newest library faculty member, Martin Patrick. He has a soft spot for cardinals. And since we really leaned into the bird tangent today, let's finish with favorite birds. OK. Marlee, go.
OK. I have a lot, but I'm going to-- [CHUCKLING] I have to say the blue bird, which-- right after we all went home for lockdown in 2020, I was taking a walk around the neighborhood and I spotted a bluebird, which I never see in my neighborhood. I know they're very common up in north Georgia. But it was like the highlight of my daily walk, was getting to spot a wonderful, brightly-colored bluebird. What about Fred? What's one of your favorite backyard birds?
Like you, I have a lot. I think it's a bird that I've seen a couple of times, but I hear it a lot at dusk and after dark. So I live way out in Stone Mountain, and there are some woods behind our house. We moved there in 2018. And when we moved there, I would go out at night and hear this noise that sounded like a baboon raising an alarm that a cheetah was coming or something. And I was terrified. What the heck is that?
And so I, of course, went to my phone, my computer in my pocket, and started typing in the search engine, "what bird sounds like a monkey?" And it just auto-completed to barred owl. It's like, yeah, everyone asks that question. Everyone knows what it is. It's a barred owl. They sound really creepy but apparently very common. So I like it. Wendy, how about you?
Hoo-hoo. Fred, I'm with you. Owls, I'm all about them. I don't know enough about them. But the other-- a few years ago, I went to a festival in Piedmont Park and I saw a pygmy owl and it did something to my psyche. And I've been like a little bit obsessed. Any time I hear a hoot in the neighborhood, I'm like, where is it?
I love it. WENDY HAGENMAIER: All about those owls. How about you, Charlie? I have a single favorite bird. It is the one great blue heron who flew over my house one day right after I had parked, skimmed down the driveway, took a hard right turn over the street, and flew off into the distance. I thought it was a hallucination, a giant pterodactyl hallucination, except there was a jogger who looked at it and looked at me as he passed my house and said, "You don't see that every day."
[LAUGHING]
One favorite bird, just that one. Roll the credits. [MUSIC] (SINGING) Oh, and everybody's heard about the bird. Bird, bird, bird, bird, bird, bird, bird, bird's-- WENDY HAGENMAIER: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rasco, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. Today's show was edited and assembled by Fred, after he filled the feeders in the backyard.
Legal counsel and perfect sweater for Georgia winters were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special thanks to Martin for being on the show. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. 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, we talked to a returning guest to find out, what's on the mind of an open-access librarian?
It's time for our last song today. Our guest, Martin, came to Atlanta from the great City of Minneapolis. Both cities, Atlanta and Minneapolis, have their musical legends, of course, in multiple genres. But in honor of Martin's former home, let's close with a legendary song by Twin Cities artists about moving on to a different town, which is, of course, what he did. This is the late disco era classic Funky Town by Lipps Inc., possibly Minneapolis's greatest music composition ever.
Have a great weekend, everybody.
I love how much validation you had to put in for Funky Town, Fred.
Got to move on.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[DISCO MUSIC]