[RELAXING MUSIC]
So I was one of those people who was always chasing the gold star and the pat on the head. And I think a lot of people who have experienced trauma in their early years, or obviously racism and other sorts of oppressive situations, I think are always chasing that. Always feel like, if I do enough, if I work hard enough, I'm going to get the validation that makes me feel like I'm good enough.
I had so many great experiences in the profession of achieving things and people giving me opportunities to do stuff. And by any normal, objective means of measuring, I should have been happy.
[ROCK MUSIC]
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 studio with Marlee Givens, and I'm on the board. And I don't know if this is going to work, everybody. Hang in there. 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 tune in for, we hope you dig it.
Today's show is called "Pump the Brakes," which is what you do when your car is going too fast to come to a complete and controlled stop with a single push of the brakes.
That's a metaphor, right?
It is a metaphor. No, we're not talking about car-- no. Let me unpack it for you. If your work ethic is a speeding car going too fast for you to see the landscape or easily avoid road debris-- CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm getting it-- --you might want to pump the brakes and engage in a little bit of slow librarianship.
Of course. Slow librarianship like the slow food movement, focusing on values, process, and sustainability instead of disruption, innovation, scaling up. So we're going to talk about achievement culture, slow librarianship, and maybe a little bit of self-care.
Mm-hmm. And our songs today are about slowing down for better results, the transformative power of slowness, and trying to escape the stress of the modern world. To start with, let's play a song about the speed that kills. When we talk about alienation in the workplace or how a corporatized world makes us all feel out of control, we often sum it up as the rat race. So here's "Rat Race" by Fuzz right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[FUZZ, "RAT RACE"]
That was "Rat Race--"
Yeah, it was. MARLEE GIVENS: [LAUGHS] --by Fuzz. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called "Pump the Brakes." And as we said, those brakes are metaphorical. CHARLIE BENNETT: Now, before we begin talking about slow librarianship and sort of live crit, let's talk about-- or let's acknowledge three librarians who have done work that provided us with material and language for this episode today.
Fobazi Ettarh, Julia Glassman, and Meredith Farkas, who you actually heard in the cold open.
That's right. Yep. Who ended on, "I should be happy."
Happy.
Ah!
All right. Slow librarianship is sort of the overarching topic of the show, but we should talk about what leads to that first.
Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Achievement culture. Exactly.
Which is not what I have always called it. I have always called it rock star librarianism.
Yeah, exactly.
[LAUGHS]
And we've done a show on that before, right?
We have.
OK.
We have. Because it's a very seductive quality or a very seductive kind of-- worldview?
Yeah.
Library value?
I actually-- I love this quote from-- it's actually a quote of Meredith's quoting someone named Morra Aarons Mele who said, "Work addiction is a socially acceptable addiction."
Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of socially acceptable addictions. But yeah, work addiction is actually understood as a kind of-- gosh, all my words have jumped out of my head. I don't know why. I think it's because it's Friday and we're a two-legged stool.
Yeah, exactly. You're in the wrong chair.
I'm in the wrong chair. I can't trust the board.
[LAUGHS]
CHARLIE BENNETT: So work addiction is a virtue if you are in a-- and I hate to be a broken record, but if you're in a late capitalist society, corporatized, neoliberal, et cetera, et cetera.
American.
American. Then you have joined the proper rat race if you are addicted to work, if you're willing to go 60 hours a week, et cetera. But achievement culture. What's your sense of achievement culture?
OK. So achievement culture, in a way it is the American culture. It's that rugged individualism. It's, you are what you make yourself. If you succeed, it's all on you. Also if you fail, it's all on you. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's all on you. Yeah, exactly. But again, listening to Meredith Farkas talk about achievement culture, it's also an organizational culture. It involves external validation. It's not only that we work ourselves to death, but we get rewarded for that.
People who go above and beyond are the ones who get recognized in our places of work. And so it just perpetuates the idea. CHARLIE BENNETT: And the disruptive or the innovative drive is kind of the funhouse mirror of achievement culture.
So if achievement culture is you've got to have a win, you've got to have a trophy-worthy win to show that you've done something-- you can't just work, you have to work well and achieve-- then innovating and disrupting becomes the sort of, how do you get above achievement culture? Well, you can transform. You can damage the status quo. You can disrupt the same old, same old. And I don't want to make a joke out of it. I do want to be very explicit.
The submarine, the Titan that was lost and killed five people in the process of being lost, came out of a disruptive, innovative culture. The sort of move fast, break things, go above and beyond, go fast, find new solutions to old problems, and don't worry about testing it. That all led to the loss of the Titan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also, just as a very silly aside, apparently Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are going to fight each other.
[LAUGHS] And if for some reason that doesn't make any sense to you, which it might not, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are sort of exemplars of move fast, break things, figure something out, change things, achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve. The opposite of-- if you remember our episode about the maintainers, the opposite of a kind of sustainable, maintaining work attitude.
Yeah. We actually have an example of that in our own library. I think all the time about all of the people that we hired in 2016. When we were in the middle of Library Next, transforming our library, we hired a bunch of people to come in and innovate and build the shiny new things that we wanted to-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Transform, reimagine. And everybody from that cohort except for one is gone.
And those of us who-- I mean, apart from the people that we've just hired in the past year or so, we also have a group of sustainers, maintainers, who kind of dug in. And we're not necessarily out to get recognized, although we have all been recognized as well. But you know, I think we kind of have both. But we did see the flame-- flame out.
Yeah. The cohort that you're talking about that came in, several of them came in and were asked to change what the library did. And then when they got to the end of that process, there was nothing else to change. So what do you do? You were hired to do a thing. You were hired to innovate, disrupt, and transform. And now, like, OK. Now stop. And it's like, no. That's not-- that's not who I am.
Yeah.
And some people also wanted a little more control over what their work world was like. And some people leveraged their achievements, their wins, into jobs elsewhere, all of which is great for individuals, but really bad for the organization.
Yeah. Yeah. And we've recently lost a big innovator whose work is not easily redistributed to other people.
You know, there's so many folks. I don't know who you're talking about in particular.
Well, we've just lost our data visualization librarian.
Yes. Yeah. Like, literally just lost.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And-- yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: You know, I don't know if there's a way to sum that all up in 30 seconds. Can you try? No.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll just say, again, I love all the quotes that I have written down from Meredith Farkas. And a lot of these are Meredith quoting other people. But "the only thing hard work guarantees is unpaid overtime, not success." CHARLIE BENNETT: That's a good tie up. Yeah.
This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more about achievement culture and get into slow librarianship after a music set.
File this set under PZ4K96475.
[LARRY WILLIAMSON, "SLOW DOWN"]
You just heard "Slow Down" by Larry Williamson. Before that, we had "You Can't Hurry Love" by The Concretes, and we started that set with "Slow Down Navigator" by The Lovelies, all songs about slowing down to achieve your goals.
[ROCK MUSIC]
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, there we go. That's my first mistake, everybody.
[LAUGHTER]
Let me stop all this. And Marlee, if you would be so kind as to begin this segment. I would. I would. Absolutely. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Pump the Brakes," and the metaphorical brakes, slowing down and perhaps-- perhaps taking a B-R-E-A-K--
[LAUGHTER]
--while you pump the B-R-A-K-E.
Oh, I hate puns so much, but that one-- that one works pretty well.
All right. But yeah, sort of coming off the heels, let's finish talking about achievement culture because that could be the whole rest of the show. I want to talk about these ideas that have come out to fight against-- it's a long, trudging fight against achievement culture, against the American way, really. I mean, it's-- CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] Oh my gosh. Are we just commies today? Is that-- I don't know. I don't know.
But I mean, so again, sort of going back to quoting Meredith Farkas, this is how the system was designed to work. This is not a bug. It's a feature.
Yeah, let me try and real quick put a stone down for us to stand on. So if achievement culture is this sort of sick feeling, kind of extension of the very classic capitalist drive-- you know? If you read Andrew Carnegie talking about why he put libraries in towns, and it's because everyone has all the same chances as everyone else, and the library is where you can make yourself who you are. So, hey. Right on.
That's a great idea, isn't it?
And we see that kind of the corruption of maybe whatever is true about that is people with spectacular achievements, or innovative achievements, or show-off kind of work habits, or even people who break the rules a little bit find themselves more rewarded than folks who are doing the work that they were asked to do. And slow librarianship might be the attempt to reclaim the worth of that job we were asked to do.
Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah.
So you wanted to finish off achievement culture.
No, I'm done talking about it.
OK, good.
Yeah. I'm ready to move on.
[LAUGHTER]
So slow librarianship kind of connects with the slow food movement. I mean, that's where the language came from. And the slow food movement began-- and don't quote me on the details-- began with a protest against a McDonald's in a European city, or a European town.
It was in Italy.
In Italy. Well, of course it was. And someone essentially began a protest by saying, this goes against our values, the idea of having fast, process-- fast, processed, and globalized food production in the midst of this thousands of years of food culture and build and tradition and continuity. From that, slow food movement then became essentially the statement of, we should not allow the tenets of mass production to diminish the quality of our lives, especially not through food.
Mm-hmm. That's a great way to put it.
Thank you. I think about this so much.
[LAUGHS]
I have to say, the slow food movement is one of those things for me personally that I-- it's wonderful. I love to read about it.
Can't do it?
I can't do it, no.
[LAUGHS]
No.
It's funny. Just in the tone of your voice and the way you were starting to lay those-- those steps out. Like, yeah. That ends with, can't do it. I have the same thing about mass transit, which really is exactly what I should be doing all the time. And you know what? I just can't do it.
Yeah. I think because I'm doing mass transit, I can't do slow food.
[LAUGHS]
Right? Well, I do slow food, so I can't do mass transit. You know, cheap, fast are good. You only get two of those.
Yep. Yep.
OK. So if we think of now-- think of slow librarianship now as a desire to, again, reclaim the worth of the job, the job which is a sustainable process if you don't add all of those requirements of constant innovation, constant extraction of value. And extracting value in a public institution becomes a very different thing than extracting value from a market, right?
I don't want to just talk and talk and talk, Marlee, so I'm going to let that be a thing that lands over there and then triggers a thought for you to speak on.
Well, and I don't want to get into all the critiques of slow librarianship either, but--
Another show.
Yeah.
Another show.
Well, I mean, another thing that I think people might be familiar with is this idea of quiet quitting. And when they hear slow librarianship, they might think, well, this is stopping doing some things that maybe you don't want to do.
Right. Slow, i.e. bad, so you must just be doing damage to the work.
Right. Or it's very expensive when you devote your resources toward providing this very thoughtful, conscientious service to a small group of people and those people really appreciate it. They're not the fast food consumer. They're not the fast information consumer.
And expensive in time and money.
Yeah.
If you have several different groups and you are crafting services dedicated to them-- say you're a public librarian and you are going and finding the refugee community in your neighborhoods and building archives specifically for them, their stories in particular from each of those countries. That's not scalable. Quote marks, "scalable." That doesn't then become a thing that you can offer to everyone because it's artisanal. [LAUGHS] It's custom-made as a service.
Yeah.
And if we don't declare that that's worth as much as the learning module that can be accessed by everyone all the time, then we'll move towards an essential fast foodness of librarianship.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I still-- I mean, I still think it's worth doing. And I will say that personally, I get-- I feel so much more rewarded as a librarian with these bespoke and deep connections with a handful of people. And it is harder for me to really measure the value of these other things that, as you mentioned, learning modules, video tutorials, those kinds of things, the self-service that we're putting in place.
And again, why-- I mean, why am I trying to measure any of this when I should be happy?
[LAUGHS] We're going to pull all these threads together in the final segment.
[LAUGHS] You're listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we'll talk more about slow librarianship on the left side of the hour.
[ROCK MUSIC]
[RELAXING MUSIC]
Hi, this is Andy Russell. I'm a Co-Director of The Maintainers, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the one and only research library rock and roll radio show.
Today's show is called "Pump the Brakes," and we are talking about slow librarianship. That's one of my favorite concepts, slowness. I imagine slowness as a defense and a transformation. If you've seen the violent and perverse television series Too Old to Die Young, then you know one of its defining qualities is an excruciating slowness. That slowness turns fluorescent '80s crime film genre conventions into something deeper, weirder, more disorienting, and ultimately to me, more rewarding.
Your mileage may vary. For another example of the power of slowness, I have the song that we're about to play. Perhaps you are familiar with Alvin and the Chipmunks. I'm sure Marlee is.
Oh, yeah.
This novelty band concept from the late '50s has become a global franchise, but its original incarnation was simply the idea that a band of chipmunks with high-pitched voices and dreams of rock stardom got into the studio, and Dave recorded them. To perform as the Chipmunks, the singers were recorded on slow tape, which was then sped up to create the now signature squeaky chipmunk voice. 43 years ago, an Alvin and the Chipmunks album called Chipmunk Punk was released.
The last track was a cover of "My Sharona." We are now going to play The Chipmunks' "My Sharona" slowed down so the singer's voice sounds normal, which also slows the music down to about a third of its original speed. It was done on a 16 RPM turntable by the musician Brian Borcherdt and is distributed as Chipmunks on 16 speed. So I hope you are now prepared. File this set under PS3519.E242.
[THE CHIPMUNKS, "MY SHARONA"]
That was "My Sharona" by The Chipmunks at 16 RPM. Marlee, I have to just ask, what did you think? You hadn't heard that before.
It makes me feel as old as that song is.
[LAUGHS] Oh, that's great. A song that exemplifies the transformative power of slowing down.
[ROCK MUSIC]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Pump the Brakes." We've talked about achievement culture and slow librarianship. So now Charlie, can this two-legged stool land the plane?
[LAUGHTER]
OK, I like your mixed metaphor. So yes, we can, because I think now we just have to talk about us, talk about our feelings about this stuff. You know, this is going to sound so stupid, but I flirted with rock star librarianship for a little while there, and I worked myself very hard and felt validated by people who said, how do you do all this, you know? I had four podcasts in production plus another radio show, and I was presenting all the time. Had newborn twins at home.
And I was just moving and grooving, moving and shaking, maybe even. And if I look back on that time, I think I think my wife was kind of unhappy. And [LAUGHS] I don't think that I was really thriving. I was just full tilt boogie from the start of the day to the end of it. And it was a good thing that I had stopped drinking before that period of time. You know. How about you? What's your experience with achievement culture?
I'm kind of married to someone like that who's a quiet rock star in his own right. But no, I mean, I've--
[SIGH]
I guess I've always been driven in a way, but not driven to fame and fortune. I think I'm too much of an introvert for that. And I knew--
What about validation?
--it would never be about money. But validation? Maybe. I don't know. I mean, I just-- I've done a lot. I've done a variety of things, and I'm always happy to just pivot and go to the next thing. And as long as I learn something and bring it along with me on the way, I've been able to really dabble in a lot of different things, and it's been very rewarding. And I have-- I've managed to be successful I think because I've landed in the right place.
Mm-hmm. I mean, the Georgia Tech Library can absorb a lot of experimentation and kind of improvisational professional identity.
Yep. CHARLIE BENNETT: The thing that I think about is how I didn't plan to do what I was doing. I didn't, like, make a conscious choice each day to move fast. I made a conscious choice to set up the circumstances that then required me to work hard and to show off in order to get the permission to continue working. You know, I don't want to say above and beyond because that's a good thing for a lot of folks.
I was working too hard compared to my needs at home and my needs internally, and to do all of the stuff that my job was designed for. And I had to decide to stop doing that instead of deciding to do it. And I feel like that's the key to slow librarianship, is that you recognize that it's easy to just speed up and start trying to go to the next win and try to get a stream of validation, but it's hard to stop and to fade into the background, and to do the job that you were hired to do. Right.
I think the thing about slow librarianship for me is that it is very positive, you know? But there's also negative and cynical ways that we can respond to this as well, you know?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
You can declare slow librarianship to just be someone being lazy with a philosophical framework.
Right. And I think another thing is that I don't think that there's a real solid definition of slow librarianship either, and it's--
It's just a feeling, man.
[LAUGHS] Yeah. It's like student success. I mean, how do you-- or pornography. I know it when I see it, right? But I mean, I could probably do any number of things and just say, oh, I'm just-- I'm just experimenting with slow librarianship, you know? But I think that in order for it to really be successful, it has to be a cultural transformation, and the organization has to embrace it. And I don't think, to be honest, our organization is going to embrace this anytime soon.
There have been some changes, but they are all personal. I think that slow librarianship as a professional movement acknowledges the fact that we are individuals who are formed by the larger project, the larger neoliberal project, or the larger capitalist project, or the larger corporatization of higher education project, whichever one of those devils you wish to-- [LAUGHS] to declare is driving you.
I think that we've done such a shallow dive into such a deep pool that we can certainly go back and say, well, what do we want to expand on in future shows? But I think the thing that we've found is that it's real, you know? And its underpinnings are much larger than just librarianship. One might be able to say, are you going to practice slowness in the face of achievement culture?
This is Lost in the Stacks, and I think it's probably time for a music set because we're getting into-- getting into the weeds there.
Yeah. All right. You can file this set under LB2840.2.H39.
[THE EXCELLENTS, "WALK SLOWLY AWAY"]
(SINGING) When I was 16 I learned to sing. I learned to sing.
You just heard "Walk Slowly Away" by The Excellents, and before that, "So Tired, Bye--"
[LAUGHTER]
--by Crumb, songs about leaving stress behind. Ah, would that it were so simple.
[ROCK MUSIC]
[LAUGHS]
Today's show is called "Pump the Brakes," all about slow librarianship. So as we end the show, I wonder if there's some aspect of slow librarianship that we could actually put into action right now. Do you have anything ready to go, Charlie?
Yeah. If there's a social media account that I'm still on, I'm going to cancel it. I think that's the best one.
Mm-hmm.
How about you?
Well, I'm torn between fighting the patriarchy and leaving work at work.
[LAUGHTER]
Which one seems more doable?
[LAUGHS] Leaving work at work.
Yeah. All right. And with that, the credits begin.
[ROCK MUSIC]
MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. CHARLIE BENNETT: Legal counsel and a languid, indulgent, Italian feast with great wine were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to all the librarians thinking and writing about slow librarianship, to the New York chapter of the ACRL for sparking this particular show, and thanks as always to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.
Our next Lost in the Stacks will cover more artificial intelligence shenanigans.
[LAUGHS]
We're going to talk about AI as long as we can before Skynet locks it down.
Time for our last song today. Let's finish our discussion of slow librarianship with a frank confession about the need for less speed for more time and a chance to enjoy what you have. This is "Pilgrim" by The Wood Brothers right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody, and slow it down a little bit.
[THE WOOD BROTHERS, "PILGRIM"]