The Loon was once in a meeting about whether her then-workplace would adopt or support further development of an innovative in-house software tool. The meeting leader having waffled on for a good ten or fifteen minutes, one of the meeting attendees cut to the chase. “So what you’re saying,” said this attendee disgustedly, “is that you think this is great, but you’re not going to support it in any way.”

There was a short appalled silence. The meeting leader, then, weakly, “I didn’t say that!”

It was exactly what the meeting leader had meant, and in a dilatory, conflict-avoidant way had said, and every last soul of us around that table knew it. What we (yes, even the tact-challenged Loon) also knew is that one didn’t call out the meeting leader’s conflict-avoidance dance, nor contradict openly even with obvious truth on one’s side. That attendee was never invited to any more library meetings—ostracism as silencing—and left not long after. The tool received no further library support, and decayed accordingly.

As Chris Bourg noted, studying silencing involves a methodological dilemma: how does one measure what isn’t said? How does one find the people who aren’t saying things? And how does one distinguish the silenced from those who don’t believe they have anything to say, those who silence themselves from the outset, or those who fear any sort of public expression?

Looking at studies of other silenced populations should offer methodological insight; the Loon will leave the lit reviewing to those more practiced at it than she. Instead, she will offer some suggestive silencing markers and potential study populations she is aware of.

Starting with the obvious: to be silenced, one must previously have been making noise. (This phenomenon easily separates the silenced from the silent.) Watch noisemakers for sudden silences, which is particularly easy to do online. Blogs abruptly discontinued. Twitter accounts deleted, or made private, or suddenly tamed to total innocuousness, or abandoned for a new access-controlled or pseudonymous account. Facebook privacy controls tightened. Pseudonymy or social steganography employed. When any of these occurs without explanation, the odds increase that a workplace silencing is the cause. This will not catch all the silenced, as noisemaking is contextual and not all noisy folk are noisy online (or noisy publicly online), but it should catch enough to fuel study.

Silencing is one reason for the exodus of talented people. Not the only reason, to be sure, so studies of jobhoppers or former librarians would have to eliminate subjects who do not recall a silencing, but a properly-designed survey can do this. A sudden firing, departure, or retirement may also be the ultimate silencing. One advantage to this mode of studying the problem is that if the Loon is any example, silenced folk hate their silencing, want to talk about it in contexts that don’t further expose them to career or personal damage… and at least sometimes feel safer about talking once they’ve left the silencing context.

A curious discovery the Loon has made is that in her experience, the professional literature remains rather unsilenced. Statements that would get a blogger pilloried can be made without overt repercussions if dressed up enough to pass peer review! So an admittedly impressionistic way of gathering a convenience sample of likely silencing victims for case studies or interviews would be to talk to people moving the Overton window in the literature or at conferences. (The Loon has a sneaking suspicion that one phenomenon that would fall out of this approach to sample gathering is that Overton-window-moving men will not report silencing nearly as often as comparable women.)

Perhaps a better way of zeroing in on these people is to ask a large sample of librarians about other professionals (or better yet, articles, conference presentations, or even blogs) they find “inspiring.” That word is code, and it’s code the Loon doesn’t entirely understand… but based on when the Loon has heard it applied to her own work, it does seem to connote expressing ideas or thoughts that could invite silencing. (The Loon’s cognitive dissonance around the word stems from hearing it applied to work the Loon herself thought was rather bleak in topic and tone!) Other adjectives are possible—“brave” perhaps the obvious one—if “inspiring” does not produce the expected study cohort.

The ideal mode of finding the silenced and silenceable would be to ask a large sample of librarians about other librarians to whom they have said “I’m so glad you said that!” (the unspoken end of the sentence being “because I believe it but have been afraid to say it myself”). Since such interactions are (in the Loon’s experience) private, they are difficult to spot. One available proxy might be Twitter retweets, especially those that thank the original tweeter, though a great many simple retweets without added commentary also point to a widely-held but unsafe-to-express sentiment. Network analysis techniques might serve to isolate this phenomenon, and the Twitter API is fairly hospitable.

Indeed, a considerable part of the problem we should care about here is not only folk like the Loon who have been silenced by others, but the self-silencers, those distinctly unlike the Loon (and the meeting attendee in the story that opens this post) who pick up on library culture norms fast enough not to expose themselves by being silenceable. The most difficult population of all to study, to be sure… but perhaps the richest, and certainly problematic for the public prominence of the profession at large.

Another way to attack the problem is to ask what kinds of sentiments are likely to attract silencing attempts. This one is easy, at least in part: silencing in libraries is commonly a mode of change resistance. Ergo, a key population of the likely-silenced will be those hapless souls hired via Coordinator Syndrome—perhaps the Loon should more politely call them “library pioneers”—to bring a novel service, practice, or tool into a library all by themselves. Developers, scholarly-communications librarians (still; certainly institutional-repository librarians), research-data librarians, digital-humanities librarians, assessment librarians, metadata librarians dumped into MARC-focused technical-services departments, even information-literacy coordinators at some libraries will likely have been silenced. Going back in time a bit, one might hear about silencing of digitization librarians or systems librarians.

What Coordinator Syndrome librarians tend to have in common, also, is that they are new to the profession. Since acculturation takes time, new librarians are likelier to have stepped (or even bolted) over lines more experienced librarians know better than to approach. Since new librarians typically start at the bottom of workplace hierarchies and outside workplace cliques, too, they are relatively easy to silence. Librarians with less than five years of post-MLS experience could quite profitably be surveyed for silencing experiences. Those who only stay in the field five years or less post-MLS should be pure study-population gold, if they can be found. (The Loon stuck it out six years, but would have been gone like a shot in years four through six had opportunity presented itself.)

This is probably enough for one post. The Loon suggests to Taiga, since they sparked this conversation, that the populations especially vulnerable to silencing the Loon put forward in the previous two paragraphs should attract additional attention and support from library administrators, as silencing is often detrimental both to their morale (obviously) and the success chances of their initiatives in the library and on campus.

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