Month: October 2017

A day in the life of a librarian (October 2017)

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Welcome to a periodic installment of ‘day in the life’ because I figure it might be interesting to see what this looks like for a librarian. This was not quite a typical day, but it gives a good range of the kinds of things I do.

(I’m not being very specific about the content of some of the things I’m working on, both because of patron privacy and because it’d fairly quickly directly identify where I work: instead, I’m talking about the kinds of questions and projects in more general terms.)

Image: A wooded path with autumn leaves, trees arching overhead. Text reads: Librarians: Day in the life (October 2017)

A not quite typical Friday

5:15am :

Get up, do minor morning computer things, put on swimsuit and nicer work clothes on top. Make sure to pack jewelry and a nicer hair thing. (Normally, I am a knit top, knit skirt, and hair in a braid person, but we have international visitors today.)

6:00am :

Leave my apartment, drive to the fitness club where I swim. Swim from 6:25 to 7, shower, change, drive to work.

7:35 am :

Get into the library. Our library and archives assistant is working in the archives this morning (so she can be up in the library this afternoon) so I turn on the lights, unlock the stacks, and pull the cart of materials for our visiting researcher out into my office.

For the next hour, I eat breakfast, work through my email, review some pages on the intranet that we need to tidy up, and read web pages about the people who are visiting this afternoon, so I can have a better sense of their possible questions. Forward one question to other people in our institution who can probably identify the thing being asked about much more quickly.

We’re light on questions today – only the one so far. Some days, I come in to find three or four waiting.

8:45 am:

Quick bathroom break, set up our webcam for monitoring our researcher and wait for her to show up at the front desk.

We have a very small staff (me, our archivist, and a shared assistant) and visiting researchers work at a desk in my office. It’s common for archives to have limits on how materials are handled (that’s another post!), and for people using materials to be observed the entire time.

Our IT folks helped us figure out a webcam option (pointed at the work table researchers use, but we can’t see things on their screen or notes, just that they’re not mishandling materials), which means I can take a quick break (bathroom, to help someone else, etc.) with a little advance warning now.

However, there are some other limitations: there’s some kinds of work I have a much harder time doing or focusing on, and I can’t do things involving extended phone calls or going back and forth to the stacks. And I can’t have music on, and there are definitely some tasks I find easier or more pleasant with music or a podcast.

This researcher has been here for two days already, so we don’t need to cover any of the basics like how things work.

9:00 am:

Waiting for researcher to appear. Get a reply to the ‘track down this particular thing’ with a list of other people to ask, send the question off to them. Answer another email re: the library newsletter. Open most recent newsletter so I can set up this month’s version (it goes out the last week of the month.)

My researcher days involve a certain amount of ‘can’t start more complex task because I am waiting for them to show up/come back from lunch, and don’t want to get into the middle of something’

9:35 : Go to plug in my phone for music, researcher arrives. Get her settled.

9:50 am:

Get a call from our front desk: there is a walk-in visitor who’d like to visit the library. Get assistant to Skype in from downstairs to keep an eye on researcher.

It turns out to be a book jobber who buys books from various sources including library discards and resells on Amazon/eBay (she is here with a friend doing something at our institution.) We discard very few books, but I give her a chance to look at our free shelf.

10:15 am:

Get back to my desk to actually do things. Take a while to settle down again. Answer an email about shifting one of our general email addresses over to Gmail (we are at the tail end of shifting from Outlook to Gmail: I am delighted by the switch, but will be glad when everything’s in one system.)

Get an answer back about the thing this morning, remove stuff not to be shared with person who asked (a “The person who developed this is very elderly, you might be able to reach her at this email” which is the kind of thing we don’t pass on to researchers unless actually necessary.)

11:15 am:

Work on newsletter. Pause to make an accessible version of a handout I want to include in the newsletter.

The newsletter is a simple Word doc that goes up in our staff intranet. There’s a section about something the Research Library offers (this month, I’m talking about getting research articles), an Archives thing (usually a recently digitised collection) and then information about the month’s book display and a list (with some brief annotations) of new titles in the library.

12:00 pm:

Have lunch with colleagues and researcher (outside on a picnic bench: we are making the most of the last of the decent weather.)

12:30 pm:

Back at my desk, doing a few small things before my 1:00 meeting.

1:00 pm:

Meeting and tour of campus with two people (the CEO and an architect) from overseas who are doing a tour of schools and organisations like ours around the world to see best practices for specific kinds of design. They were fantastic.

(Also fantastic: the foundation that gave them a multi-million dollar grant on the condition they did such a tour. Very smart. They were learning a lot from seeing how different places did things and what was working for them best.)

3:30 pm:

Dash back from the tour just in time to let my assistant go for the weekend (since she’d been the staff member in charge of our researcher.) Grab a bottle of fizzy water because that was a lot of walking. Catch up on email that came in while I was gone, try to finish the newsletter except for pulling the new books.

3:55 pm:

Discuss interesting reference puzzle with archivist. Put interesting puzzle on to-do list for Monday, because the amount I will get done before leaving is approximately 3 minutes and a lot of frustration. See researcher back out to the main door, do a few tiny things.

(As a note, the research on Monday involved about 90 minutes of diving into the actual process by which people made sculptures in the 1840s. Who knew?! We’ve got useful answers now, though.)

4:15 pm:

Head home, via my local pharmacy for a flu shot. Get back home around 5:30 (due to the flu shot: I normally get home around 5.) Make dinner, fall over, do brainless things for the rest of the evening.

What is remembered lives: research connecting someone to their ancestors

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Last spring, I did a presentation at Paganicon about research relating to ancestor work.

My full notes from that presentation (including slides) are up on my Seeking site, but I thought Samhain (at least where I am) was a good time to talk a little more about some aspects of things I brought up there.

Image saying "Research: what is remembered, lives" with a photograph of pomegranates, one whole, one sliced in half.

I’m focusing here on the complexities of history, and will come back and do an article series on academia and its research goals sometime later, but if you’re curious about that, go look at the notes from the presentation.

Why do we care?

One really good question with any research project (or really any project) is figuring out why we’re putting time into this thing, and what we hope to get out of it.

For some people, ancestor work is part of their religious practice (or at least possibly part of their religious practice). Sometimes that’s about blood relationships or relatives we knew directly.

For some of us, it can be about more distant relationships, or interests or skills we have in common, or about individuals we want to connect with for other reasons. For example, I honour a historical figure – Hypatia of Alexandria – as an ancestor of profession, in work that’s about intellectual curiousity and learning.

(This can also be a really good solution if you’d like to do ancestor work, but the ancestors whose names and identities you know are not necessarily people you’d like to interact with more, for a variety of reasons.)

Sometimes, historical research is also important for understanding the history of ideas.  My good friend, Kiya Nicoll, has been doing a lot of research about this recently as it relates to the soup that makes up the Pagan socio-cultural movement, and you can read more on her website and here’s a graphic that gives an idea how complicated some of the relationships are (you’ll want to zoom in) and one more specifically about religious witchcraft. Note that this is very much a work in progress, so things are still being edited.

So many kinds of history

One of the things that fascinates me about historical research is that there are so many more goals and desires in it and ways to approach it than just ‘write a an academic paper’. (Frankly, I think that’s often one of the least interesting ones.)

I like to say that research is a conversation with the world and with time. There are some fixed points we know about (when we know a specific thing happened, or someone did something) but there’s a lot of space around that for things that are much more varied and complex.

My history has popular non-fiction in it. It has musicals. (Hello, Hamilton) It has historical fiction, and historical mysteries, and fantasy novels modelled on historical events. It has reconstructions of food and drink and clothing. It has walking tours and public history events and podcasts and websites. It has rituals and meditations and trancework. It has family photographs and stories from the community, customs and memories.

No one of those things gives the whole picture – but different parts can illustrate different things, and let us see different aspects more clearly. Sometimes it takes designing a historical dress or pair of shoes to realise what that meant about what people did in those clothes, which things were easy and which were challenging. Sometimes looking at the food customs tells us things about what abundance felt like, and the change of seasons. Sometimes fiction lets us immerse ourselves enough in the time and place to start asking different questions or explore different issues,

My day job as a librarian is about 1/3 history by our statistics, questions about the institution I work for, people associated with it, and questions from children or grandchildren of alumni – people where the stories passed down in the family aren’t available any more, and they’re curious about the family history.

Every time we get one of those, I learn something else, because even if they ask something we hear a lot, their particular question is a little different from everyone else’s. And I learn from what they bring to their questions.

Complications in history

There are so many complications in doing history. Never mind doing it well.

Missing pieces:

Most potential sources didn’t survive for us to study. Some cultures didn’t write much down or sources didn’t survive. Some kinds of material require too much time or too many resources to use. (What gets funded is often determined by other needs than doing great history.)

Example: The Etruscans didn’t leave much written material. They have some gorgeous art, but we have to guess about what some (a lot of it…) of what it means.

Biases:

All people – and all sources – have biases. Some are obvious. Many aren’t. They’re still there. Biases are often present in multiple layers of history. They affect what was recorded, when, what was preserved, what gets studied.

Example: Myths being written down after an area had become Christianised: some things may get left out or changed to fit the preferences of the majority culture. Someone studying those writings may also bring their own biases about how to translate words or ideas, or what they mean. Religious topics are perhaps particularly vulnerable to this.

No ‘right’ answer:

Good research is often more about the questions than the answers. It’s also about remembering what we don’t know and can’t find out. It can be very easy to think there’s a right or wrong answer, and it’s usually not that simple.

Example: Some of history is facts (the dates of events we can document in multiple sources), but the why and details are often a lot more about interpretation.

Different priorities:

How we do history has changed over time. Previous scholars may have ignored important things or inserted biases. We have new tools, new science, and less destructive methods of investigation.

Example 1: The excavation of Troy was done in a way that we’d never do now (hopefully!) but it destroyed the probable layer that existed during what came down through myth as the Trojan War.

Example 2: Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th century abbess and nun. She wrote some amazing works of science (and is one of the earliest authors to describe both migraines and female orgasm.) For a long time her music was ignored because it wasn’t like what other people were doing. Here’s Sequentia singing O Virga Ac Diadema.

Practical limits:

Time and money are not in infinite supply! Access, funding, tools and skills available for analysis all depend on a lot of factors researchers may not be able to control. New tech tools are great, but have costs or a learning curve. Some places are heavily affected by war and civil unrest. Confidential information may exist, but not be usable.

Example: There’s a classic core work of astronomy from the 10th century that was only translated into English in the past five years – no one had put together the language skills and interest in the topic to that degree before. The work is known as the Book of the Fixed Stars in English, and you can now read a translation for free thanks to the work of Ihsan Hafez.

Legal limits

In more recent years, a lot of information may not be available (or at least not yet).

Privacy laws affect what information is available. These include things like delays in release of census data, or laws limiting how health information educational information are shared. (In the US, that’d be HIPAA and FERPA, but European privacy laws are often much more restrictive than the US.)

Stigmatized or minority communities, conditions, or backgrounds sometimes had very little information kept, or only from some points of view…

Names are challenging

Common names or name changes can make it incredibly hard to figure out relationships.

My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Smith, and her first name was pretty common when she was alive. My maternal grandfather legally changed his name five times for complicated reasons involving assimilation into his local culture and laws changing. Both of these make it really tricky to do genealogical research that goes beyond those people.

People also often write or interact under other names – and if you don’t know those names, it can be hard to track them down.

Example: We had an example at work where a researcher suddenly realised the person she was researching had used a pseudonym for some of his writing, and there was a massive trove of articles she hadn’t looked at closely yet.

Curious about historical research?

I’d be delighted to help you figure out how to attack a historical project – it’s part of my consulting services. This can be a fairly quick round of helping you figure out where to start, what resources to check first, or it could be more involved research consulting. That’s up to you!

If you’re curious, check out my consulting page, and describe what you’re interested in.

Copyright for Pagans: What creators should know

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This is the last part of my series on copyright for Pagans (at least for the moment.) This piece focuses on what you should know as a creator of copyrighted material (which you almost certainly are.)

Copyright for Pagans: What creators should know

You create copyrighted material all the time

… but that doesn’t mean you have to treat all the material the same.

You create copyrighted material every time you send an email (or write a text or a tweet or a Facebook update). You create copyrighted material if you post videos of yourself (or your kids) on YouTube. And if you’re a writer, or artist, or musician (creating original works), you’re creating copyrighted material there, too.

It’s good to sit down periodically and think about what you’re creating, and how you want to handle that. Every 6 or 12 months is a good range, or if something major changes in your life.

Questions to ask yourself:

1) Where am I creating materials?

Do I have a new blog or project or place I hang out and interact? It’s good to do a quick inventory of where you’re currently creating content – it makes it a lot easier to double check policies, think about long-term considerations, and make plans.

For example, you might decide you want to keep a copy of your own content. A regular review can help point out the sites that make it harder to do that. Maybe the kinds of content you’re creating have changed, and you want to keep copies now, but didn’t care as much last year.

2) Do I need to review policies on any sites?

Basically any online site that allows you to talk to other people probably has a clause in their terms of service that talks about allowing them to publish what you share for purposes of use on the site. If they didn’t include this permission, they couldn’t share your stuff with other people. That’s normal and reasonable. But watch out for sites that change their policies, or that try to restrict how you can use your content on other sites.

3) Do I want to give blanket permission in some cases?

Some people do Creative Commons licenses (that give blanket permission to share materials in certain circumstances, like not-for-profit uses, or with attribution) for all their content. Some people do it only for some. Other sites, like Unsplash, collect materials that can be shared and used freely.

4) Do my own spaces have clear policies and contact info?

Do spaces I control (like a personal site, business site, blog, etc.) have copyright statements and information? Is there a way for people to reach me if they have questions about my content?

You don’t need a copyright statement for things to be under copyright, but it’s definitely helpful in reminding people what your policies and preferences are. Because a lot of what I write depends on other material on my blogs or sites, I don’t do Creative Commons, but am generally glad to give permission on request.

5) Where am I getting materials that I use?

Are they coming from appropriate sources that have given permission?

Sharing on social media gets really complicated – but we can decide for ourselves what we’re okay sharing and using. I use photos from Unsplash (which can be modified or shared, and don’t require credit) for my blog, but give credit when feasible. I try to share materials from a creator’s own site or social media accounts whenever possible. I look for credits on art and other creative works, and make sure to share those.

You may make different choices, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good to review what you’re doing, how you feel about that, and whether you want to change anything.

6) Do I have a will that mentions intellectual property?

You create intellectual property, so it’s good to mention that in your will. (I need to do one for my current state: it’s in my to-do list for this month). If you have content online or offline, think about designating someone who can make decisions about that after you die, or whether you want to make a decision about releasing it to the public domain. (Or some of both!)

I have multiple websites, plus a lot of comments on a couple of forums, some of them lengthy works of information in their own right. Designating someone who can make decisions about it is a smart move.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Neil Gaiman explaining why this is so important (and not just for the brilliant writers out there. If you’ve ever created anything that’s helped someone else, moved them, meant something to them, then this is a way to make sure that can continue to happen.)

Legalities

Should you register your copyright?

That depends on a lot of factors. Registration can be complex, especially for things like blogs or collections of less formal work, but may be more worthwhile for books.

You don’t need to register to hold copyright – but registration does give you additional options if there are violations of your copyright about what you can sue for.

All of that said, suing for copyright is, in many cases, expensive and frustrating. Benebell Wen, a lawyer who does intellectual property (and who is also an author of works on Tarot and astrology) has a great overview of why copyright infringement is hard to fight. Because issues of jurisdiction, lack of understanding of copyright by many lawyers and judges, and other practical issues, bringing a suit often only makes sense in really significant (precedent setting cases) or other outliers.

Does someone else own your copyright?

If you have signed a contract with a publisher, there’s a decent chance you’ve signed over at least some of the rights you originally held as the creator. This is why it’s really important to have an agent or lawyer familiar with publishing contracts check your contract before you sign it. Publishers (and music producers, and people who make art available through prints, etc.) need permission or to hold the copyright to do some parts of that (making copies, distributing them, etc.) The details can vary a lot between different kinds of works – some things that are completely standard in music contracts would be completely wrong in book publishing, for example.

Contracts vary a lot about exactly which rights, what happens if an item goes out of print, under what circumstances (if any) the creator can get the rights back, and so on. Look for busy, well-run forums for creators of your particular medium for a place to start with advice or what to look for. I’ll look at pulling together some resources, too.

What happens if there’s an infringement?

Think about what you’d like the outcome to be.

Sometimes emailing and asking for a credit link may make more sense than legal options.

(Some people think you have to take action on any copyright infringement or you lose your rights. That’s a myth when it comes to copyright. (It is more complicated for trademark infringement.) You can decide to use a legal process with some infringements, and let others go.)

There are some legal processes that can help.

If your material is posted online, and you want it removed (and the servers are hosted in the US), the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has a specific set of steps for you to follow.

For large sites, there’s usually a form or other structured way you can make a report. For personal sites, you may have to figure out the hosting service and contact them. Benebell Wen includes a link to templates you can use when writing these emails or letters in the post I linked above.

Decide how much time and energy this is worth to you.

Some people find copyright infringement of their work to be a thing where if they know about it, they need to try and make it go away. Other people find that they spend too much time focusing on it, and it makes them miserable.

Figuring out which is the case for you is usually helpful in making long-term plans. If you need to know if things are misused, you might spend more time setting up automatic searches or using tools that help you find infringements and a system for dealing with them (i.e. having a template on your computer ready to go, reading about issues with copyright regularly, maybe a little consultation with a skilled lawyer who deals with intellectual property.)

If knowing makes you miserable, you might prefer to post more material in ways that are harder to copy or have other people use, set up searches in different ways, and make some specific choices about when and how you look for your own material.

A lot of people are somewhere in the middle: knowing that you’ve decided to make a DMCA report (or equivalent) in most cases, but will let things go if it’s more complex than that is a choice a lot of people make. Or that you care more about images than text, or text than images, or whatever’s true for you.

Using other people’s material

If you blog, share items on social media, or do a number of other common things, you may be using other people’s copyrighted material. Here are some general best practices:

Was this piece designed for sharing?

Retweeting a comment on Twitter, yes. Reblogging something that keeps the chain of who posted it and links back to the original? Generally okay on sites where that happens (think Tumblr). Copying and pasting someone else’s writing into your blog wholesale? Probably not.

Is this the original?

Link back to where you found the original and include whatever information about the original there is. If you can’t figure out the original source, seriously reconsider whether to pass it along and how. Links and information about where you found something and why you think it should be part of your work (or you’re sharing it) are great.

Have you checked out permissions?

Some creators are glad to share their material widely (Unsplash, as I mentioned above, is a way to do that. So are Creative Commons licenses) If that doesn’t apply to the thing you’re sharing, consider whether linking to it or referencing it would work just as well.

Is this an entire work?

Don’t repost entire works unless you’re sure it’s okay. That means don’t share entire copies of books, or entire artworks (or things like Tarot deck images, etc.) If it is okay with that artist or creator, a practice of linking to their own site and permissions with a “Shared with permission from…” is a great thing to do.

Is there a way to contact you?

If you’re regularly posting other people’s content, make sure there’s a way for someone to get in touch if something slips through (contact form, comments on your site, whatever works for you.)

A few last words on this series:

I expect I’ll be coming back to copyright sometime in here – if you weren’t clear about it already, it’s a topic I enjoy digging into. Have a question? Please ask (in comments or on my contact form.) I remain a librarian, not a lawyer, but I’d be delighted to see if I can at least point you in the direction of useful resources.

Copyright for Pagans: Common situations

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So, all this talk about copyright, what does it mean? In this part, I’m going to talk about some situations that come up commonly, and best practices for dealing with them.

Copyright for Pagans: Common Pagan situations : white chalk text on green blackboard background.

Personal notes

People sometimes wonder where the lines are, and I’ve known some people who panic about copying material for their own personal notes.

Copyright law has an exception for personal research and study. It’s okay to make a copy (from a legit copy of a work) of a moderate amount of material for your own use – for example, a specific chapter of a book that’s most relevant, or an article from a journal issue, or a selection of articles from a bunch of different journals specific to your topic.

The key is that it’s for your own personal research, and it shouldn’t replace the purchase of that book, or that journal, or whatever. The minute you want to share your collected stuff, you’re stepping outside personal use, and some different concerns apply.

What else is okay? It’s usually fine to copy something (or portions of something) into your own notes, such as a chart, map, layout, quotation, summary, etc. that you find helpful.

Here’s some examples

  • Copying a specific ritual bit (spell, invocation, etc.)
  • A layout for a ritual set up, Tarot spread, or other item.
  • An article on a specific obscure deity from an academic journal
  • A chapter dealing with deities from a specific location from a larger book.
  • Keeping a copy of a public post (such as on a blog) for future reference or study (i.e. a post about a particular tradition or group).

Key tips

Whenever you make copies of materials like this, it’s important to note where you got it from. That way, if you ever do want to use it in a way that requires permission or formal citation, you’ll have the information you need.

The information I find useful to note includes:

  • Author’s name
  • Title of where I got it from (blog, website, book, journal, etc.)
  • Address of site (if relevant) or other contact information for the author.
  • When I collected it

In some cases, noting what I was working on when I found it is helpful. If you’re collecting PDFs, many PDF readers have an annotation tool that means you can type in brief notes on a blank bit of page (beginning or end).

Creating a ritual

One of the things some Pagan folk do a lot is create ritual, or help provide ritual.

And no one wants to stop in the middle of ritual to say “This chant comes from Jess Middleton’s Songs for Earthlingspage 77, and it’s by Donald Engstrom” (One of my favourites, and not just because I know Donald.)

So how do we handle that?

One way is to provide ritual notes at the beginning and end, or to provide them in some other format, so people can track down that chant.

For example, if you have a website, email list, Facebook or Meetup page, put the notes in the ritual of pieces from elsewhere afterwards. Some groups might do half or quarter sheet pages with lyrics and also things to take away from the ritual, like a reminder of the focus or the names of the deities invited.

Sometimes it’s possible to slide that into a description “We’ll be singing “This song” written by This Person, to raise energy to charge our working and “Other song” written by Second Person as we share in food and drink together.”

Key tips

If you’re using other people’s stuff, make it easier for the people you’re sharing it with to find more of it. Everyone wins that way. It also provides reassurance that you’re not misappropriating materials.

(I was around for a situation where someone lightly rewrote evangelical Christian songs and passed them off as their own work. Not only is this not cool on the copyright front, and probably disturbing to the creators of the works who had other things in mind, but it was really jarring and ritual-disrupting for people in that ritual who knew the originals, had strong emotional reactions to them, and didn’t expect to hear close variants in a Pagan ritual.)

It helps a lot if you use sources that mention where they got things when they share them – the Songs for Earthlings book does this, as does the Panpipes Pagan Chant site from Ivo Dominguez for chants. (And sometimes you can use these sources to find the original creators of things you learn elsewhere.)

Blog posts, reviews, and similar writing

Book reviews (and reviews of other things, like audio recordings, podcasts, sites, etc.) are a common way to share resources and talk about them. It can be a great way to send traffic to the sources and resources you most like.

People often wonder whether it’s okay to quote, and if so how much. Here’s the bad news: there’s no clear on answer to this, but there are some common good ideas.

Key tips

Quote the minimal amount you need to to make your point. If you like someone’s ideas but don’t need to quote the precise words, summarise or paraphrase the original.

Not sure how to do that? Here’s some great clear examples from Kate Hart using Harry Potter as the source. The rest of the article has some useful tips too.

A good guideline is no more than about 2-3 sentences in a longish (1000 words or so) blog post or online post. If you’re writing a review or discussion of a piece of material, then you’re adding additional information, and you can usually get away with quoting a bit more. For longer works, a common guideline is 250 words total from a book-length work, and proportionately less for shorter works.

On social media, if you’re sharing images or passing along information, make sure you include link backs to the original – it can be easy to miss these when reblogging or tweeting.

Formal writing

The most complex section in some ways, because there are so many variations here. But it’s also the briefest here, because my basic guidance is to look for resources on the kind of formal writing you’re doing .

Academic writers use one of a variety of style and citation guides (MLA, APA, Chicago, or many other field-specific ones) to manage this, and those citation guides take entire books or websites to explain.

In the meantime, keeping clear accurate notes of your materials and their sources will go a long way.

This series

The last part will be coming soon, talking about what to do if you create material (and you have created copyrighted material yourself, I’m quite sure!)