The C-word
(The Loon is indebted to several Twitterfolk for this insight.)
Seasoned librarians often understand the politics, spoken and un-, of hiring and position creation. This is, of course, one good reason for library-school students to find librarian mentors as quickly as reasonable. (Nota bene, students: most of your professors are not and have never been working librarians! Find a working librarian!) In all fairness, though, libraries could sometimes do with being a bit more transparent about these things.
Exempli gratia, the word “Coordinator” in a position title. Beware it, especially in combination with a new or non-traditional job niche. Research-data coordinator. Scholarly-communication coordinator. Assessment coordinator. Information-literacy coordinator. Digital initiatives coordinator. Run screaming from “institutional repository coordinator.”
The problem with these jobs is that as often as not, there’s nothing actually to coordinate. No budget. No dedicated staff. No IT resources. No established service. “Coordinate” all too often means “try to establish a beachhead by begging your new colleagues to vouchsafe you a few minutes of their time now and then, knowing that their supervisors won’t tell them to and you have no authority whatever to demand anything of them.”
Oh, but the buck will stop with you, Coordinator, on all matters regarding your service. Be aware, also, that because what you’re doing is new, you must hit a home run with it, quickly; slow and steady gains will not do. If you don’t, two damaging assumptions arise: that the service is a waste of effort (which is typically what several of your new colleagues believed from the start), and that you’re a lousy librarian. You’re a coordinator now; congratulations!
Why do libraries do this? Why go through all the red-tape gyrations of establishing a new position only to set it up to fail? Eh, it’s complicated. (Isn’t everything?)
As difficult as it is to establish a new position, changing job descriptions on existing positions is harder, and riskier for library administrators. Because of widespread librarian distrust of “management” (sometimes warranted, often not), administrators spend political capital as rarely and charily as possible. Spending it on changing job descriptions invariably invites resentment in the ranks. Spending it on innovation is painfully risky, of course, librarians being a failure-averse folk. In short, a library manager would rather risk a “coordinator”‘s neck than her own. Only sensible, really.
A second difficulty, often, is the level of belief in both library and library administrators that the new library service (never mind its “coordinator”) is desirable and necessary. Libraries aren’t immune from shiny-chasing and herd-following, neither of which typically leads to a well-planned, well-integrated new service. A “coordinator” whose own reporting chain doesn’t believe in (or, in particularly bad cases, understand) what she’s doing is quite thoroughly and comprehensively doomed.
A third problem is not unique to librarianship: the “1. Hire coordinator. 2. ???? 3. Profit!” syndrome. There’s a goal in sight, a grand one to be sure: sustainable scholarly communication, evidence-based praxis, a shiny online presence, whatever. The path from the existing situation to the goal? Er, right. Isn’t it the coordinator’s job to figure that out?
Well, no, in fact, it really shouldn’t be. The word “coordinator” is at the very least a tacit acknowledgement that the goal in sight cannot be accomplished by a single person. Ergo, it’s the library’s job—not the coordinator’s!—to work out enough of the path, particularly in the short term, to assign adequate resources and create adequate infrastructure. Leaving some poor “coordinator” to plan in isolation and then struggle alone against the Abominable No-Men (and women) in every level of library organizations who resist all change and all novelty unless baldly ordered to cooperate is a loser strategy.
Another problem arises from a genre of practitioner literature that has no name that the Loon’s aware of. For the sake of argument, the Loon will call it the “skills roundup.” For time-hallowed library specializations, the skills roundup takes the form of “how have requirements and responsibilities in job descriptions for this type of position changed over time?” (You’ve seen these articles. The Loon knows you have.) Early articles about new specializations simply offer laundry lists, since there’s no time series to compare against.
Slightly later articles—as “coordinators” and other maverick managers start to strike out, and the profession at large whispers uneasily about it—take a somewhat more prescriptive (even accusatory) stance, more like “what skills should a ‘coordinator’ have to succeed?” Yes, this subgenre tends to assume that existing “coordinators” are incompetent; it’s clearly someone’s fault the New Thing isn’t working, after all! Welcome to coordinatorship.
These latter articles beg a question, of course, one that damns the entire skills-roundup enterprise: could anyone untouched by deity succeed, with any set of skills? Considering the next-to-nothing “coordinators” are usually given to work with? It’s not that thinking about skills is bad. It’s that it’s risibly insufficient.
The Loon, if she had her druthers, would start a new genre of practitioner literature. Call it the organizational roundup. What characteristics of library organizations allow particular niches, new ones especially, to take hold and flourish? (There is, certainly, a literature on change management in library organizations; this would be a set of specialized instances of that.) This would be a rather more difficult genre to design and conduct research protocols for, the Loon grants; it’s full-on ethnography, it doesn’t stop at coding up a few dozen one-page job descriptions.
She does think it would help library organizations do better at change management, though. If it stops libraries hiring and abusing “coordinators,” so much the better.
Jobseekers: how does one avoid the set-up-to-fail “coordinator” positions, aside from roundfiling any job ad that uses the word (which honestly isn’t a bad idea)? The Loon suggests a couple of useful interview questions, easily insertable into the “Have you any questions for us?” portion of the proceedings.
“Could you clarify what or whom this position coordinates, exactly?” is a fair one; make sure you deliver it with an ingenuous smile and palpable curiosity, the least sarcastic inflection being utterly verboten in interviews. If they fumble this question, clearly not having so much as considered it, do not accept the job if it is offered. If they tell you about a task force or committee you will lead, probe: who is on it? did they volunteer? how much time do they devote to it? what is its charge? what power will it have? If all they tell you about is software, run; screaming is optional, but may relieve the spirit.
“What do you think the person in this position should accomplish in her first year?” This of course tests whether the library has adequately thought through the path to their ultimate goal. If they ask you this question before you have a chance to ask it of them, once again, don’t take the position if offered. They aren’t comparing your answer to their internal sense of what your first year should be; they have no such internal sense. This makes it dreadfully, fatally easy for them to stuff you into a corner, forget about you, and assume that any difficulties you run into are your own fault.
In some cases, “how are you doing this now?” will be helpful. If you will be newly “coordinating” an existing library function, however suboptimal the current implementation, do the folks doing it actually want a coordinator? Do they think they’ll derive a benefit from your presence? Do you agree with the benefits they perceive? If it seems not, do not accept the position; it’s pure org-chart wrangling, not a real addressed need.
There may well be healthy coordinator positions not of this type. Now that the Loon’s mad red eyes have been opened to the C-word pattern, however, she must admit that she has yet to see one.
Oh, I am sharing this with my colleague who just got saddled with the “coordinator” label for instruction. Your description of “begging your new colleagues to vouchsafe you a few minutes of their time now and then, knowing that their supervisors won’t tell them to and you have no authority whatever to demand anything of them.” In fact, that was what I went through when I was, lo and behold, instruction coordinator myself at a previous MPOW.
As for the whole transparency in libraries thing, I am stopping now so as not to keep ranting.
The Loon is seeing an awful lot of “why isn’t info-lit instruction working? why don’t faculty know that we do info-lit?” questioning in library discourse of late. She thinks Coordinator Syndrome is assuredly one part of the problem.
On the dangerous “coordinator” positions in libraries: worth reading: http://t.co/wF6VOP34
I was just wondering if you were spying on my life for the last 5 years! Yes, I WAS a coordinator, and EVERYTHING you said happened to me. Especially that part about having all the responsibility and none of the authority. So, I heartily endorse the idea of avoiding at all costs any job that has the word “coordinator” in its title. It is truly a recipe for failure. BTW, I am now happily employed at another institution where they don’t have coordinators for anything. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
:-)
Glad you made it out!
Your bitterness is showing. Come to my library and talk to any one of our librarian coordinators, of which cohort I was a (functional, successful) member for six years. Not all libraries are the DisfunctionVille you grew used to.
A few questions arise that seem worth pondering:
Is Coordinator Syndrome a function of organization size? Of particular orientations on the Mahoney/Antelman/et al. quadrant set? Both of these strike the Loon as reasonable hypotheses worthy a decent test.
Would your library have adequate answers to the interview questions the Loon posited? If so, then the Loon isn’t seeing a problem with her post. If not, then the Loon owes it to library jobseekers to rethink those questions, and would be pleased to do so.
The Loon knows she’s bitter. She believes she’s not unreasonably so. What is perhaps most noteworthy about her style of bitterness is her orientation toward helping others avoid the tarpits she fell into, no matter how poorly that disposes those in positions of power toward her.
(She is, in other words, constantly asking herself the question “How might the Loon have avoided the fresh hells she kept finding herself in?” and sharing her work.)
This is, to be sure, not the only way to respond; one classic “good” response is to turn around and try to stimulate reform in the suboptimal organizations, and the Loon respects those who do so. The Loon knows, however, that she’s utterly useless at it. Another classic “good” response is to praise the good organizations while ignoring the poor ones. The Loon believes immovably that this allows too many people to get away with far too much.
So she makes what productive response she can, this being it.
As for “but I’m different!” Yes, to be sure. That doesn’t invalidate the Loon’s perspective (nor the Dancer’s, nor the Quantum Archivist’s), and the Loon finds the constant verbal hedging needed to evade this objection more than a little wearying. Being mad and cruel — and, as you say, bitter — she doesn’t bother with it.