As always, the key lies in “authority work.” This pinnacle of traditional cataloging has periodically been decried (both pre- and post-Web) as a time-consuming element that doesn’t “show” to the public. As a result, on the high-low quadrant, it falls into the square of high work, low impact. Administrators have tried to get catalogers to drop this practice over the years (I was subject to such pressure many times when I worked in tech services).

Yet, here we are again–talking about reliability and authority.

My guess is that Google probably spends more time on such activities than we do, even though their focus is on creating algorithms to do this work rather than having individual humans spend time on the actual activity. That’s just a guess, though, because Google says little about its proprietary, corporate intelligence practices (understandably).

I have not paid attention to this tool myself, but I will definitely check it out and follow the trail provided by this wonderful article to try to understand better just what is going on.

The future is exciting, but I suspect the future is more Google’s than libraries’ when it comes to this sort of thing. Our job, more and more, is about brokering information and helping users to understand both what is going on behind the scenes and also what attention they need to bring to the information they retrieve.

We also do a big splashy exhibit for the annual production of Arroyo, our campus literary magazine, including a “launch” at a local bar as well as on campus events. Local authors published in Arroyo come to the launch and read some of their work. Of course, the same cast of characters tends to attend these types of things.

Both these events take a lot of work on everyone’s part, but they’re totally worth it. That said, while I like some of Aaron’s ideas, we are stretched so thin these days that I’ve not tried to do anything more. There just isn’t time.

Second, while I know we’re all buckling under budget cuts and increased workloads, librarians cannot take up the cry of “We are relevant!” while at the same time eschewing work that the teaching faculty want us to engage in. I would add this in with our other instructional opportunities as a chance to connect with both students and (perhaps even more importantly) faculty, as a gateway for opening the conversation about what *else* we can do for them and their students. It may start with citations, but faculty are well aware that their students have research knowledge deficits. If we can start the conversation with our good work on the side of citations, it will likely develop into a deeper relationship and liaising with faculty to further develop students’ information practices.

On the other hand, I have had the experience where faculty ask me to go over citation because they see it as purely mechanical and a waste of *their* time, so I can understand pushback against that experience. Even in those cases, though, that doesn’t mean I can’t teach citation it in a way that deals with larger intellectual issues around remix, reuse, and attribution.

1. I want to educate our students–not train them, not help them get a job, but educate them.

2. I want to help our students improve their writing skills. Our students are not getting hired because they can’t write well enough to get hired. A recent report showed that in four years of college, our students’ writing skills are not improving by much, if at all.

3. I want our students to read–anything would be good, but literature should be a part of that. Why? Literature of all kinds helps us to understand ourselves, to think seriously about our moral compass, and to experience the joy of expression in the written medium.

4. I want our faculty to focus on a suitable combination of educating students and conducting research. In a Research I university, research is the primary mandate, teaching (preferably educating) is the secondary one. In four year comprehensives, teaching (preferably educating) is the primary mandate, research is the secondary one.

What I also want (might as well keep dreaming!) is for both students and faculty to keep these goals in mind. Students understandably seek employment, but this is now so tied to higher education as a business practice that they have lost sight of education. It is our fault for misrepresenting the role of education in our drive to increase our business.

Faculty have also lost sight of the research agenda in non-Research I institutions. While research is a primary mandate in Research I universities, it is not so in others. Faculty, through tenure and promotion processes, put more pressure on themselves than is necessary, demanding more and more publication to achieve tenure and promotion. This is just silly. Workload and the number of hours in the day are finite. Administrators and deans sometimes take advantage of this thrust and make things worse, demanding more grants as well as more publication. All of this drives articles and books that can fit on the head of a pin. Many of our faculty are so worn out with teaching and grading, particularly when many don’t have T.A.s and class numbers are rising, that expecting heavy research and publication is unrealistic and unproductive.

We need to get back to basics, help our students understand the role of education, and help our faculty with a reasonable balance of education and research for the institutions in which they are working.

Perhaps all this is far from the original topic of “Publishing in Literary Studies,” but the larger picture underlies the topic that has been raised and if we don’t address the underlying factors, any discussion of publishing in literary studies becomes moot.

What Baurlein does not say is that most people who get tenure-track jobs aren’t asked to publish. They teach four classes a semester, do their service work, and that’s that. The other topic he does not breach is graduate study at the kind of universities he does discuss. Graduate students are a necessity at such universities because someone has to teach bonehead English to the very many students who enter, and leave, such universities, unable to write clearly. Such labor has to be performed inexpensively, and graduate students are at such institutions the least expensive teaching labor around. Tenure-track and tenured professors do such teaching if they have 4/4 jobs, but it will be a long-hard battle to get them into composition classrooms at the places Baurlein surveyed.

When most Ph.D’s finish or do not their degree, they take better paid but still poorly paid jobs as adjuncts and lecturer. I am a well-paid lecturer and that means that, in my eighth year in the job, I teach three classes a semester, and I earn $39,700 a year. The university contributes 10% of my salary towards my pension, which is a topic for another entry, and provides me with health insurance. 3/3 is a low-teaching load, and $39,700, even eight years in, counts as well paid.

I have an M.L.I.S as well as a Ph.D. in English. Had I been hired by a university library eight years ago, my starting salary at most libraries, including the university at which I teach, would have exceeded my current salary, and at some of those libraries, again including the university at which I teach, I would have been given a regular sabbatical. Before I went to graduate school, I worked in the second hand book trade in London, and the money I earned there, in real terms, is at least the equivalent of what I make now. I also estimate that I earned at most $120,000 during the nine years it took me to get two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. I am the well-paid present of university teaching in the humanities. If Baurlein wants universities to put more emphasis on teaching, he might suggest that universities appropriately reward the people who do much of the teaching: adjuncts and lecturers. He might also, of course, teach more classes himself.