You know that over the past few months, I’ve been sharing increasingly enraged material about the FCC’s horrible ruling on net neutrality.

If this travesty goes forward, it can profoundly affect the service we provide in all libraries. You know that nice internet we have? It’s keen. People like it. They may come to our library just to use the internet. Computers are a thing, the internet is important, and taking away our access to it is a significant problem.

What does net neutrality mean? The short version is that internet providers will be able to happily charge us whatever they want to get to different websites, they can block our access entirely to websites they do not support, and can slow our internet to a crawl whenever they want.

Like Facebook? That’s probably going to cost extra. Ever been to Google? Have a Gmail account? Good luck getting to that if you have the wrong internet provider. Watch cute kitten videos? Be prepared to end that hobby unless you pay for the “fast lane” access.

Seriously – lose your mind over this. It’s absolutely worth it.

Here’s a quick look at an article from American Libraries journal. Click here to go to the full text to get a better idea of the developing issues. You can also browse the American Library Association’s website to get more information about the library’s stand here.

Net Neutrality Updates

“On February 1, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments about whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was arbitrary and capricious in reversing its 2015 order, which included rules against blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization of internet access. In the case—Mozilla et al v. Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—consumer groups and some companies are trying to restore the net neutrality protections policy that is needed to keep the internet open to all users. How will the upcoming decision affect libraries?

The American Library Association (ALA), which filed an amicus brief in 2018 with other groups seeking to defend net neutrality in Mozilla, asserts net neutrality is essential for a library to meet its public mission of increasing access to information. In 2015, the FCC adopted strong net neutrality policies to require all internet traffic to be treated equally. But the agency did an about-face and eliminated those policies in 2017.

ALA has been on the front lines of the net neutrality battle with the FCC, Congress, and the federal courts for more than a decade, working in coalition with other library and higher education organizations as well as broader coalitions of net neutrality advocates.

…

At the same time, the internet moves on. For the most part, internet service providers (ISPs) are treading carefully while legislation is pending. But instances of misbehavior have concerned net neutrality advocates.

In 2018, David Choffnes, assistant professor of computer and information science at Northeastern University in Boston, and his fellow researchers developed an app to measure if ISPs regularly throttle streaming services like YouTube and Netflix. The results? Nearly every major wireless provider specifically throttles video, even when the network is perfectly capable of handling the load. In a statement last fall, Choffnes pointed out, “There’s no evidence that any of these policies are only happening during network overload. They’re throttling video traffic even when the network doesn’t need to. It happens 24/7, and in every region where we have tests.”

Verizon, the largest mobile wireless carrier in the US, was the biggest offender on Choffnes’s app, with more than 11,000 instances of throttling between January and May 2018. AT&T, the second largest carrier, had almost 8,400 instances of throttling. Sprint was found to be throttling traffic from Skype. While we do not know how the FCC would have responded to these incidents under strong net neutrality rules, the 2015 rules made it less likely that companies would engage in this kind of behavior in the first place. Those rules also had expedited procedures for dealing with incidents where an ISP may be violating net neutrality principles—critical for institutions like libraries and consumers, neither of which have the resources for a drawn-out process.”

Ah, wouldn’t life be simple if we could just KNOW things? If we could know ourselves, without shading over some parts and incorrectly exaggerating others? If we could look at someone and know what they wanted in life and what kind of person they are?

I think this is a common, if usually unspoken, yearning – especially when you are in a customer service profession like libraries. Why are other people so confusing? Why don’t other people respond to things the way we do? Or think the same – obviously correct – thoughts we think?

Confusing. Frustrating. Filled with opportunities to make mistakes that will wreck the next hour, day, or lifetime.

But we keep trying – and that’s probably the secret to it all. Keep trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes, keep trying to figure out how they feel so we know what to do next.

And there are tons of tools for this!

I’ve been teaching library management classes for about 15 years now, and I often have students take the Myers-Briggs “test” – or at least the freebie versions you can find online. (The real one costs real money; the faux ones are good enough for our purposes.)

Have you taken this? Google around to find one that speaks to you, or just use this one (click!). (That’s just the first one I found when I googled, so don’t get overly attached.)

Click on answers. Hit the final button to get some results.

Huzzah! That’s you!!

Well…it’s kind of you. It’s possibly you-in-this-moment.

I’ve taken assorted faux versions of this test dozens of times, and I do tend to fall right into ISTJ and INFJ. (Boring but steady. Hi, yes I am a librarian!) Every so often – including today when I just re-took it again, I turn up as an ENTJ. I credit this to taking it as I’m sitting at my desk, and taking a break thinking about cool stuff we are doing here at CMLE. (NOTE: be sure you subscribe to the newsletter to get all the good news!) It tweaks my personality just enough to push me over that E/I border.

(I’d still suggest taking it; but if you prefer leaping to the answers, they are right here.)

So, there we go. I read through all the handy info about my type (or, my type today), and I feel like I’ve learned valuable insights. Yay.

But really – who cares?

When I assign this to my students, I don’t really care what types they present as. (I mean, I *care* but not deeply.)

Instead, this is an opportunity to think about other people.

Those 15 other types on the handy chart? How do you relate to them? THAT is the value of doing this kind of test.

When I travel, I like to set up a handy notebook with hotel/campground reservations collected in one place, have a few possible eating locations browsed in advance, and to know about the neat touristy things I’ll want to visit (museums, statues, historical signs, etc.). When I go places I want to see and do things I’ll like, and for me, preparation is part of the fun.

My brother, on the other hand, once called me to say he couldn’t come over that day because he and his friend had been talking about Cajun food – and they decided to drive to New Orleans. From Springfield, Illinois. He was calling from the road.

I nearly fainted.

(Hey, I like spontaneous trips too! I just…like to have them planned out in advance….)

I am baffled by his approach. He is, doubtless, baffled by mine. (I doubt he gives it much thought, honestly; he’s off doing stuff instead. I find that baffling too.)

But this is when I realized: it doesn’t matter what I think. He’s not wrong.

(Shhh…nobody ever tell him this, but my brother is smarter than I am, and he’s good at all kinds of stuff. I can’t tell him that, because it’s my job as Mean Big Sister to keep him smacked around and in line. You get it, right? But it gives you context here.)

I’d be miserable on his road trip. He would be miserable on my road trip. But we both like road trips, and there we go: we found commonality, and meeting each other on terms we can each work with.

I think that’s the secret to the Myers-Briggs, and other such personality inventories. You can see very clearly that what makes you happy will very much not make other people happy. What stops you from doing something will not stop other people. The things that motivate you to live your best day will motivate other people to smack their heads into a wall to make the pain stop.

So take the Myers-Briggs. (There is some research validating the real test, so you have that going for you.)

Take the Ennegram. (As far as I can see, this is pure hokum, but…I came up as a #1 and #8 – which is pretty spot-on for me!)

Check out your horoscope. Or – this week is the Chinese New Year (happy New Year!!); read about your sign in this system. (If you are pig, be cautious this year; wear jade to fend off bad luck.)

It doesn’t matter what type of system you use.

Look around at other people. Figure out how to relate to them where they are, not where you want them to be, or where you wish they would be.

Why am I going on and on about this?

Because we are a customer service profession. And we do talk pretty often about how difficult that can be for everyone.

Making this effort to extend outside of yourself, your expectations, and your own baggage helps you to connect with other people. Trying to figure out what they want, and what will resonate with them, makes your work more effective – and also easier for you.

(And if you want to send me your Myers-Briggs types, or share your horror stories about taking assorted personality inventories, I’d be so happy to hear about it!)

 

I hate that phrase.

“But we’ve always done it this way!”

It’s usually accompanied by a wounded look, combined with that look that says they wish I would shut up and go away.

It’s easier to just keep coasting along without thinking of new things, new books, new ideas, new programs. Doing the same thing means nobody has to take chances, to take a chance on making a mistake and failing. Just cruise along, no sweat.

I hate that. And I’ve been the one who said it.

Libraries are not supposed to be just cruise-along organizations! We are supposed to be out there! We take chances, we make mistakes, we get messy! We do cool things!!!

I’ve talked about how I got started in libraries – I used to skip school and spend the day in the library. Yeah, I was a rebel! School was boring, but the library was filled with all kinds of cool things: new books, new ideas, new stuff to try. And I could walk down the block to get McDonald’s for lunch. The thought of that makes me ill now, but at the time it was an amazing adventure. The library meant freedom, adventures, and the chance to delve into things that made me really happy. My love grew from there.

So I’m always confused when people treat libraries with so little thought, with such casualness. It always takes me by surprise when everyone does not think libraries are amazing.

And when I found this article recently I was pleased. I love to see library people moving forward and thinking about new ways to be great for their communities!

Click on this article to get the full story, after you check out some quick ideas below. Can you try some of these ideas in your library? How else can you work to make your library more inclusive, more usable for your community members?

Seven statements library professionals should rethink in 2019

“There are many things that libraries got attached to in their long history such as fines, the library card, the Dewey classification and many other things that librarians have tested: the switch of focus from books to other activities, the removal of quiet zones and more. Some of them are not that successful anymore or still need more time to see the actual results.

1. “Library fines are good. “

2. “The Dewey classification is the standard.”

3. “An ID and an address are needed for joining the library.”

4. “You need a library card to access the services.”

5. “The library is no longer a quiet space.”

6. “Books are no longer important.”

7. “We need dedicated teen spaces.”

The library landscape is in a continuous change, and librarians with their skillset are in the best position to try to take the pulse of the visitors and rethink the library’s services based on the users’ current needs while making sure not to go beyond the library’s core principals.”