I became a “Certified Records Manager” on January 1, 2019 after beginning the process nearly three years earlier. If you have applied for other certifications, this will all seem pretty familiar to you. To earn this certification, you first submit an application documenting work experience in records management. The amount of experience required is reduced commensurately with higher education. The process is less tedious than applying for the PMP exam, because you do not need to document contact hours on specific projects, but there are work verification requirements on the front end, rather than by random audit. At the time of application, you have to provide a resume and letters from your employer confirming your work experience. Following your acceptance as a “candidate,” you can register to take examinations.

The “Certified Records Manager” designation is awarded following the successful completion of five multiple choice exams and a sixth, written exam that you qualify for upon completion of the other five. When I took my first examination in February 2016, the multiple choice exams were only administered a few times a year, so unless you wanted to take multiple exams in the same week, it was necessarily a 12-18 month process to finish the examinations. I think it’s easier to schedule the exams now, and that parts 1-5 are generally available by appointments at testing administration centers. You do not have to take these examis in order.

I believe that Part 6 is still only offered a few times a year, but it’s probably easier now to get through the other five tests faster if you are in a hurry to get the certification. I think ICRM gives you three years to complete the exams.

What I most appreciated about this process was the introduction of an intermediate “Certified Records Analyst” (“CRA”) credential that allowed me to extend the completion time to five years with maintenance of the CRA. This turned out to be immensely valuable to me for several reasons.

First, it let me “signal” my progress towards the CRM with an intermediate certification. I think the certification helped my resume pop with recruiters who were looking for CRMs. There aren’t that many! And many experienced ones are not necessarily looking for work. I definitely got more contact from recruiters when I added that certification to my LinkedIn.

Second, my personal life changed a lot in a three-year period. Seven months after I took my first exam, I bought a house, moved my boyfriend into the house, then to Chicago, and spent over 10 months conducting a long-distance job search. (The downside of these records management positions is that they don’t turn over often, because they’re great jobs.)

I was only able to become a CRM because my CRA status conferred an extension of my eligibility period to complete the CRM examinations. My candidacy was extended for two years. Life changes are always stressful, but my CRA status meant that I didn’t ever worry about whether my window to become a CRM was closing. I just didn’t have the energy or focus to sit for Part 6 (the written exam), and if I’d had to pay again to sit parts 1-5, I’m not sure I would ever have come back to this project, especially after getting my current job (thanks in part to the CRA). ICRM’s thoughfulness in designing the CRA so that candidates can continue their journey to the CRM without feeling the pressure of time is one of the reasons I’m excited to start giving back to the profession now that I have reached this milestone.

My investment in this certification has absolutely paid off. My focus on records management allowed me to make two big career moves. After completing my MLIS in 2015, I moved from libraries into (federal) records management. My next step was from the public to the private sector after completing three years of federal service in 2018.

Becoming a CRM was a long journey for me, and my personal financial investment in the certification exams meant that I was extremely motivated to stay current with the field, maintain involvement in my local ARMA chapter, etc. Although I didn’t study for the exam, per se, having the external structure of the exam series helped me to develop and maintain a base of knowledge that I was able to draw on in interviews for records management positions. My progress towards this credential helped me feel comfortable presenting myself as a knowledgeable professional and subsequently considering jobs at a higher level than I ever dreamed of achieving with my work experience.

I plan to maintain this credential even if I take a role that does not involve records management. Another unexpected benefit is the community of people with this credential. Everyone I have met through this process has been a valuable contact, and many of them are great people as well. I suggest requesting a “mentor” for the process, because you might get paired with someone awesome. ARMA has been my favorite professional association by far, and I’ve been involved with two chapters, so I don’t think it’s a fluke. This is a profession that attracts high performers and that rewards competence. Earning your CRM puts you in very good company.

For my librarian readers: even if you do not think you want to be a records manager long-term, this is a good jumping off point to get out of libraries.  If you want to explore a big company or a different industry, coming in as a “subject area expert” is a great way to get a foot in the door and position yourself for bigger changes by growing your network and taking advantage of internal training. The CRM opened a door for me into a great employer, and that opened doors that I didn’t even know existed and helped me imagine many new possibilities for myself. It’s not an exaggeration to say that getting this certification completely changed my life. (More big news to come next year…)

A degree in library science is great preparation for this certification. I did not study for any of these tests.  I felt well-prepared from my graduate coursework but I thought that many of the multiple choice questions could be answered with some office experience and common sense. I struggled the most with questions about legacy record formats (ICRM is phasing some of these out).

I failed one part (I think it was Part 4) by one point (!) and had to retake one section. This was discouraging and made me rather anxious about Part 6. I finally got up the courage to try after taking a half day Part 6 workshop with my local ARMA chapter. My assigned “mentor” through ICRM also provided me with some legacy material from ICRM’s website (sample questions and a sample answer) that helped me a lot.

If you’re going to take Part 6, you should absolutely request a mentor, but I’m also happy to speak with you. When we have in-person tests again, I’ll be a grader, so I’ll hopefully have more insight to share. You can always email me, about professional certifications or anything else: anita @ anita life dot com. Good luck!

As a resident of the Midwest, I have a dog in this fight, because moving government jobs here would be a huge boon for a region that is in dire need of jobs. I’m thrilled to see federal investment in Kansas City. And if you believe that climate change is a real and pressing issue, you should support government policies that might spur growth and reinvestment in the Midwest, too.

The Midwest is depopulating, despite having tons of infrastructure and the capacity for the kinds of dense, resilient cities I’m told we need to weather the coming climate apocalypse. We have irreplaceable strategic assets that are currently crumbling because decades of federal disinvestment and policies have favored coastal areas at our expense.

So with that caveat about my personal bias, let’s get down to my hot takes:

The culture in Washington, D.C. is toxic and contributes to administrative bloat.

Specifically: there are many highly paid feds who should retire but don’t because they are paid above market wages in positions that are very cushy.

I have worked in four government agencies and all were either overstaffed or had dead weight on staff that should have been cut. In my experience, most federal agencies in Washington are full of useless managers who pawn their work onto subordinates and/or contractors (the contracting racket is a rant for another day).

These managers refuse to retire, because their subordinates are doing their work, and the managers are often “teleworking” while their peons do the jobs of the absentee manager. (Of course, they’re not doing any work while they’re in the office, either, and most of their employees are probably more productive when the bad managers are at home and staying out of their way. But maybe some of them would retire if they had to go into the office…)

These managers have ruined and squandered a generation of talent. They have enabled our bureacracy to grow far larger than it needs to be by lying about how overworked they are. They have failed again and again to perform the most basic aspects of their jobs. But they’re allowed to continue in their roles because of a fundamentally broken culture in Washington.

These are the people who will finally leave government service if we move their jobs to the heartland. Every American should toast their departure.

There is no accountability in Washington.  Every time one of these managers fails to deliver, they claim their failure is because their agency is understaffed and underfunded. Then they receive more money to hire other people to do the jobs they’ve failed to do. I have personally seen this happen over and over, and it’s not limited to the federal government.

My husband worked at a semi-governmental agency before we moved to Chicago. When he left his job (because of an awful manager that HR refused to fire because they claimed it would be age discrimination), they didn’t just backfill his position. They created two new managerial positions (each of which pays over $120,000) and there were plans afoot to hire fifteen contractors to do his job.

My husband may ultimately be replaced by seventeen additional people (in addition to the person who got his old job), and the work he was hired to do still hasn’t been completed. We don’t know how many people were eventually hired: but the fact that replacing him with eighteen people was even a possibility is completely insane.

Of course, his former employer is constantly asking for more money from the federal government, and one of the awful managers he fled recently requested $80 million for an “artificial intelligence” project. (The project is not actually an artificial intelligence project.)

The managers who oversee these clusterfucks in Washington are paid handsomely. And it’s not just the managers who are well-compensated: mid-level bureaucrats in Washington outearn most managers in the civil service in the rest of the country (and, in fact, the world), thanks to bonkers salary inflation that I personally believe is a result of D.C.’s uniquely toxic culture.

Before I dig into this, a little context. Federal employees are paid according to a salary table called the “General Schedule.” This schedule provides for location adjustments (i.e., an employee in New York makes more than one in Colorado.)

The lowest paid federal employee in Washington is a GS-1 (“Grade 1″), Step 1. They make $25,458 annually. The highest paid employee is a GS-15, Step 10 ($166,500.)

In theory, a GS-1 might be a mail clerk (in practice, few positions are ever posted at a GS1 – many entry level positions are a GS3 or higher). A GS-15 should have significant responsibilities, since they are among the most highly compensated professionals in the United States government.

In practice, many of the GS-15 employees I met in Washington were doing less work than their counterparts in the private sector, and being paid more for it. There are additional employment categories for employees with specialized skills: employees in the “Senior Executive Service (SES)” and “Senior Level (SL)” or “Scientific or Professional (ST)” make even more than GS-15s. (You can likely guess about whether most of the SESs I met had any actual skills.)

But let’s get back to the big picture.

The rampant grade inflation in Washington-based federal jobs is proof that the civil service there is unmoored from basic economic reality.

The average federal employee in Washington, D.C. is a GS-12. (The lowest-paid GS-12 in D.C. makes $74,596.)

The average federal employee in the rest of the country is a GS-10. (A GS-10 in Pittsburgh makes $58,209.)

You might suspect that this is because there are more senior jobs in D.C., but you’d be dead wrong. There are more highly graded jobs in Washington, but the pay level does not remotely correlate to the work many civil servants are actually doing (this cuts both ways, and I’ll get into that in another post).

I would bet my life that the average GS-10 in Pittsburgh works far harder than the average GS-12 in Washington. I looked at federal jobs daily in Washington and in Chicago for over a year: the Chicago jobs overwhelmingly had more responsibility at lower pay grades. My year-long job search led me to conclude that there is significant grade inflation in the D.C. area.

Let me give two anecdotal examples of grade inflation:

I worked at an agency’s headquarters in Washington, and interviewed last year for a job at their field office in south Chicago. The contrast between the field office and HQ in DC could not be starker: my position here would have been a GS-5 with more responsibility than I had as a GS-11 in DC, and the hiring manager was a GS-13 with over 300 employees across two states in his chain of command. There are managers in Chicago that are a GS-7. I can’t begin to count the number of useless, nonsupervisory GS-12s back at headquarters. (You don’t have to take my word for it that managers in the government are rarely held accountable: there are tons of federal employee surveys that you can review at your leisure.)

My job search left me with the impression that federal employees in Chicago were more competent, despite having significantly lower salaries than their counterparts in Washington. This impression is supported by the personal experience of another family member who works regularly with regional employees from the Department of Transportation. This family member has said many times (and I’ve heard it repeated by their professional peers) that the caliber of employees in the midwest regional offices was much higher, and that the D.C.-based employees were generally incompetent (and especially so in comparison to the midwest-based employees). Of course, the ones in D.C. were being paid more for similar work.

Here’s another fun anecdote about overpaid employees. A friend writes:

I was a GS-11 working at an *agency* and was essentially a secretary. No real big responsibility, non-supervisory, etc. I worked in a marketing office with roughly 14 employees. They were ALL GS-14s, many of them in their 20s. Non-supervisory, not super significant. The 14 was just something you got if you stayed for a few years.

The managers were all GS-15s and the managers above them were all SES. When I took my current job I took a downgrade to a GS-9…I am now an assistant director with a TON of high level responsibilities. My director is a GS-11. Supervisory.

Some managers are GS-12s (there’s only one for each facility) and they are so fancy that we call them Mr. and Mrs.

There is a GS-14 (ONE of them on the whole entire base, the largest military base in the region) and he is the deputy director of the whole base. This is mind-boggling to me.

In short, while I would love to have my cushy GS-11 that would have eventually led to a 14 without much effort, it just didn’t feel right. And I would be happy to see some of these jobs move out of DC…the government needs a broader pool.

My friend is right: these jobs should be relocated. The rest of the country has never recovered from the recession, while D.C. has continued to boom. Compensation in the federal sector is completely divorced from prevailing wages in the private sector in the region. And compensation in the civil service in Washington is divorced from the compensation civil servants receive in other geographic locations.

Here’s the visual proof:

These two lines would almost certainly be closer together if D.C. salaries were excluded.

Not one journalist reporting on this issue has ever made a compelling argument that there is a benefit to taxpayers from having these jobs in Washington, which forces me to ask the obvious question: Why should the economic benefit of these jobs be concentrated in one of the most affluent parts of the country?

And, a bigger question: why should D.C. remain uniquely insulated from our country’s economic downturn simply by virtue of its status as a historical federal employment center?

In my opinion, the culture in Washington (and the overpayment of civil servants there is a symptom, not the cause) means that continuing to locate these jobs there is a detriment to taxpayers.

Seriously, D.C.’s culture is messed up.

It’s unfortunate that an honest criticism of the culture in Washington is missing from the discourse. I hope my blog can do its small part to shed light on the culture I left. I love living in the Midwest, and I think more jobs should move here, both for the obvious climate and logistical advantages, but also because D.C. is objectively bad and working in that kind of institutional culture damages people on a deep and fundamental level that is rarely discussed.

In my experience, the average professional in Washington is simply not as skilled as the average professional in Chicago, because most people haven’t ever had to truly work (much less work in a functional or high-performing organization). This isn’t just limited to the federal government: it was also clear in my last area of work (public libraries). The District of Columbia Public Library system is swimming in money, but my former employer (Prince George’s County Memorial Library System) consistently delivered better and more innovative services with a fraction of the budget.  So does the tiny one-branch library in my 22,000-person Chicago suburb.

I have examples from my husband’s line of work, too. If you look at the District of Columbia government’s budget for road maintenance, and consider the temperate weather there, you’d would quite reasonably expect the District to have the nicest roads in the country. It doesn’t.

There are roads in Southeast D.C. that are worse than the roads in my broke-ass town in the Chicago Southland. The fact that no one in the District is embarrassed about their failure to deliver basic services via a transportation department with one of the highest budgets in the country just goes to show how broken the city truly is. (Of course, roads in Virginia, where taxes are lower, are much better. It’s almost like having infinite fake money makes bureacracies worse…)

Culture matters, and Washington’s is terrible.

In my opinion, Amazon made a big mistake in choosing a market where they’re going to overpay for people who are used to working in less-than-challenging conditions. Working for a bad boss and not having enough work to do can really mess you up. If I had stayed in Washington any longer, I surely would not have been able to recover my wits. I escaped a year ago, and I’m still not as sharp as I was before I started working for the government.

We all pay the price when a generation of civil servants rots because they work in a fundamentally broken place.

Our government should move these USDA jobs to Kansas City. It should probably move many more jobs away from Washington.

And it should move them to the Midwest.

People in the Midwest are used to working harder for less money: we’re a bargain for taxpayers. We have great universities. Our cities are underpopulated, have tremendous infrastructure, and have baked-in climate resilience.

Give us those sweet federal jobs.

We need them.

In my next post:

I’ll explain career ladders, how federal hiring is terrible, and more (including a brief history of the idea of moving government jobs out of Washington, which predates the current administration). At some point, I’ll also respond to some of the frequent criticism lobbed at these plans, and engage specifically with the matter of the climate scientists whose jobs are moving to Kansas City.

Thanks for reading!

I wanted to expand on my remarks about this since 1) my Twitter account is private and 2) the toxic culture around the CIA petition has reared its head again. (I actually wrote this a few months ago during a different toxic callout culture incident, but it’s once again timely now that the CIA has purchased a booth at ALAAC.)

For your hate-reading pleasure, I’ve grouped my objections to the “No CIA at ALA” movement into a few categories.

Some of the CIA critics are seriously confused, and should not be taken seriously.

The ALA/CIA issue started when the American Library Association featured the CIA library in a regular feature on their Instagram account. It was a super popular post and the comments on Instagram were overwhelmingly positive. (The reception was so warm that the CIA then purchased a booth at ALA’s annual conference. These booths are not cheap. So, ALA’s staff successfully monetized their social media presence, while reacting nimbly to the desires of their online audience for more information about these jobs. Sadly, instead of kudos for a job well done, staff were barraged on Twitter with accusations of “collaborating” with the CIA.)

I should have known that trouble was brewing when Librarian Twitter had a meltdown, accusing ALA of letting the CIA “take over” their Instagram. In fact, it was a post in a series of “instagram takeovers” which featured many government libraries. But I guess Librarians Online thought that the ALA had actually “turned over” their handle and/or information.

To those people, I sincerely ask: what is wrong with you?

There was an entire series featuring different libraries where it was clear that professional photographers had gone onsite and taken pictures ahead of time. It’s terrifying that any of these people teach about “information literacy.” I think these people should get off Twitter and get some common sense. Unfortunately, attacking people who disagree with them online isn’t enough: a handful of these Library Twitterati are now planning to “protest” the CIA at the next ALA conference (and by “protest” I mean “prevent jobseekers from accessing information they are interested in at a vendor’s booth”).

So here I am blogging about them, instead, with the hope that a reasonable blog post will persuade people who are on the fence to mind their own business and let conference attendees look for whatever jobs they want to at an expensive conference that they paid to go to.

Government by protest/Twitter/petition/etc. undermines representative government structures in membership organizations.

After Instagram-gate, Library Twitter got upset about the CIA having a booth at the conference. I believe people protested at the 2018 conference, and then there was a widely publicized open letter. I have an issue with letters like these, which have sadly become more common within our field.

Governance by this kind of petition is not aligned with my personal values of representative government.

My first criticism of this”open letter” was that its authors should have asked a member of Council to introduce a resolution or a proposal at Council, thus triggering the mechanisms that are in place for a more discussion. Plenty of councilmembers signed the petition. Any one of them could have introduced a resolution to either ban the CIA or to form a working group to create a proposed exhibitor code of conduct.

Instead, they signed an open letter that seems to have fizzled out (discussion of the matter seems to have basically faded to people making personal attacks on me for pointing out on Twitter that some people who paid to go to a job fair might actually be interested in highly-compensated federal jobs with excellent benefits).

I don’t like open letters/petitions because they trick people into feeling like they have done something simply by signing. These types of petitions devolve into a form of performative activism that I feel provides short-term social/emotional validation without actually generating strategy or momentum around broader justice and access issues.

These periodic bursts of outrage and petitions are not just a distraction from the real work of governance. They also obscure the wishes of the majority of the membership. A vocal minority on Twitter is mistaken for the membership itself. Random people, not affiliated with ALA, sign these petitions. Members of Council then chastise other members for asking whether signatories of these petitions are members, occasionally speaking of them perjoratively because of their skin color. This kind of racial commentary is unprofessional, and worse: it’s not collegial. People should be discussing ideas, not attacking each other personally. (For an example of how polite discourse devolves, you can check out all the crap people said about me on Twitter because I pointed out that the American Library Association is not the Antifa Library Association.)

This kind of disiveness leads to low member engagement, and worse: it leads to people leaving our professional associations because they’re sick of the Twitter echo chamber and bullying of anyone who expresses an opinion that isn’t perfectly aligned with whatever today’s social justice groupthink happens to be.

I have more to say about online call-out culture and the people who are cynically leveraging it to build platforms for themselves, but I don’t want to go there in this post. Maybe I will say some of it on Twitter. Follow me for real talk!

This particular protest of the CIA is ad hoc, and does not offer coherent policy recommendations. 

Beyond my issues with performative activism in general, and specifically how it creates a toxic call-out culture at ALA, I simply think it is wrong-headed to propose to ban the CIA without introducing a broader vendor policy. It puzzles me that there was no petition to ban far more dangerous vendors from ALA.

For example, Reed Elsevier, DBA LexisNexis, has been providing database services to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement since at least 2014. These databases are used to track down undocumented people in the United States. Apparently, it took the current administration’s solicitations for librarians to notice that LexisNexis bid on proposals for “extreme vetting” tech.

Amazon Publishing is also exhibiting at ALA. Although the publishing arm of Amazon is probably pretty well separated from the (likely racially biased) facial recognition software it sells to law enforcement, there are still serious privacy concerns with every aspect of Amazon’s business.

If we are trying to ban vendors who make the conference “unsafe,” I think Elsevier is a much bigger risk than the CIA. Conference attendees know to steer clear of the CIA, but are not necessarily aware of Elsevier or Amazon’s activities. Thus, the myopic focus on the CIA was a missed opportunity to have bigger discussions.

Speaking of the bigger picture:

The vitriol against the CIA is bizarrely specific.

I don’t believe that the CIA is uniquely evil or nefarious among government agencies. I do not see a meaningful difference between the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the State Department.

So why are we not writing open letters in support of banning all of them pre-emptively? Why single out the CIA?

Nor do no I think there is a bright line between the work of intelligence agencies and the work of Congress or the higher levels of the Executive Branch. Would the anti-CIA people ban the White House from recruiting librarians? What about the Library of Congress? The Library of Congress provides research assistance to members of Congress, who set imperialist foreign policy and have these other nefarious agencies reporting to them. Most U.S. government agencies are complicit. (I also do not trust the Library of Congress to run a search engine, which is among the most ridiculous suggestions I’ve ever heard on Twitter. The fact that it came from academics is frankly terrifying.)

And for that matter, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between working for the CIA or working for any number of private scetor employers. I certainly don’t think working for the CIA is inherently more unethical than working for Facebook, for example.

Speaking of shady tech companies, I think it’s interesting that people with computer science degrees aren’t bullied online for accepting positions in the private sector. This brings me to my next issue with the people trying to ban the CIA from ALA:

The discourse around this particular job is a manifestation of broader themes of class privilege, classism and ableism in our profession. 

The CIA offers highly-compensated jobs with good benefits in a field where people are hurting for both. People think it’s okay to try to censor information about these jobs because of the pernicious class privilege in our field. I don’t think it’s okay for librarians to censor information from people who have spent their own money to go to ALA because they want to find a better job.

I can’t help but notice how many academic librarians signed that open letter. Your perspective on ALA is different if someone else is paying for you to be there.

So shut the fuck up.

In library school, my classmates and I often chatted about new job postings, specializations, etc. I would often make comments to the effect of, “that job doesn’t pay enough for me to apply,” or, “I’m focusing my studies on data analysis because it’s better compensated.” Conversations about money usually result in someone eventually saying, “we didn’t become librarians for the money!”

Actually, I did! I worked 30-60 hours a week during undergrad. I did every kind of job under the sun and I still couldn’t find work after graduating college. I moved back in with my parents in northern Virginia and got a job doing customer service and managing the file room at a car dealership. My parents told me that grad school was the new bachelor’s and that I needed to go back to school.

We landed on library science in part because I had a low undergraduate GPA (thanks to working at jobs that I thought would position me for employment after school – I was wrong) and serious learning disabilities (my undergraduate major choices were limited by those). I also had a neighbor who was a successful law librarian and an adjunct professor at Catholic University, who had planted the seed with my parents long ago that I should be a librarian.

I was skeptical about library school, because I had been following people online for years who seemed to regret their degrees and who posted all the time about how bad the job market was. (Unfortunately, I didn’t realize until after graduating that all of those people have been complaining about their jobs for over a decade yet I’ve never seen them at networking events. I also discovered via conferences that some of them are just borderline unemployable in customer-facing positions.)

But any librarian who can get a job with the CIA can just get a job elsewhere!

Again, why does no one ever say this about software engineers, or any other job? Hmm. Anyway…

Although I’ve read a lot about how this is a “generalist” degree that positions you for lots of different work, unfortunately, I haven’t found that to be the case. Although I have the skills, aptitude and experience to successfully perform in many roles (especially in market research, which is my original and perhaps greatest interest), because I haven’t held full time work or unpaid internships in a handful of the “right” places, I can’t get past an HR screen.

Adding to my challenges finding work, many companies prefer to hire and train 22-year-olds than 30-year-olds with actual work experience, but if you don’t have the right degrees or internships during college (or if you go to the wrong school), you can’t get a job when you’re 22, either.

Of course, plenty of libraries also prefer to hire inexperienced 20-somethings over library professionals…but that’s a post for another day.

Most people complaining about this just don’t understand the D.C. job market.

In DC, if you are a librarian, you only really have two choices. You can either make ~50k at a contractor with marginal health benefits and 2 weeks total PTO (these positions usually top out at around 80k for people with highly specialized skills), or working for the CIA making 75k+ with a much better insurance and PTO package. If you have legal research experience, I assume you can get a job in a law firm – but I don’t, so I assume I wouldn’t be successful seeking these kinds of positions, especially given the sheer volume of unemployed JDs.*

Most federal jobs in the executive branch/competitive civil service go to military veterans. You can get around this by working for the Library of Congress (the legislative branch has way more discretion in hiring), but that’s an employer well-known for nepotism.

The intelligence agencies are some of the very few meritocracies in DC – and they’re known as pretty great places to work as a result. (Other highly technical agencies are also good places to work. But if you had the aptitude to be a specialized and successful research scientist, chances are, you wouldn’t be a librarian.)

Speaking of specialized and successful researchers: I’m constantly shocked at how little academic librarians are paid. I make more in Chicago than my colleagues in academic libraries in the Bay Area, DC area, and Seattle. Some of these people have ten years of experience. I don’t think that’s okay.

If you think it’s okay, you might have class privilege.

Speaking of good places to work:

If your employer claims to have a positive mission, they are probably abusive (and most of the library field is)

Here’s a PSA for anyone still reading this: most passion careers and employers you’d feel good about working for are abusive.

The irony here is that all these would-be censors fawn over April Hathcock when she writes a blog post about how the library is a plantation, but they are actively trying to censor information from people who are so desperate to get off “the plantation” that they paid hundreds of dollars of their own money to go to a job fair.

The bigger irony, of course, is that they want to lecture ME (a first-generation American – my family fled a Latin American dictatorship) about “class solidarity.”

Working in these kinds of organizations is terrible for people’s mental health (and often their physical health, since employees are subjected to guilt-trips about not being committed enough to the mission when they try to set boundaries).

I know this because I’ve been there: I turned down jobs with a financial regulatory body and the Department of Defense because I wanted to work again in disability advocacy and policy. Talk about an abusive field!

The employers that don’t have a feel-good mission usually pay better and have more interesting work environments. Because these employers make money off of their employees, they are invested in hiring good people and preventing them from burning out. At my job in the private sector, I have great work-life balance and am intellectually stimulated on a daily basis.

So, look. If you want a vacation? If you want to be able to save for retirement? If you want to be able to enjoy a nice meal out or help your family out with money? You’re not a bad person. And having your retirement squared away, and taking vacations, are all incredibly valuable for your mental health. (But I guess encouraging people to tend to their own physical and psychiatric needs isn’t “solidarity” or “intersectionality.” Whatever.)

If you want to make $75,000 as a librarian, and the CIA is your only chance to do that, I don’t see how you’re any more “complicit” than a janitor who works there. Librarians aren’t setting foreign policy.

It’s a decent office job in a high-cost of living area. People will probably be pretty nice to you. You’ll have a high-level security clearance, so you can command a higher salary in other government consulting roles if you want to leave. There is nothing wrong with aspiring to upward class mobility.

Anyone who tells you otherwise has class privilege of their own (or a partner who helps pay the bills).

Because I am not ableist, I don’t judge people who need or want to work in healthy environments.

Speaking of healthy work environments and ableism…

When I started library school, I was waiting tables. This reinforced my conviction that I needed to get a desk job ASAP, because my body is not suited to positions that require a great deal of standing. I had other issues after working as a page for 18 months. Fortunately, with good health insurance, I’ve been able to get my body back into shape.

If you have a chronic health condition (or a family member who needs care), the federal govenment is really your only option in DC. If you don’t believe me, consider that federal employees are about to get maternity leave, despite their already-generous sick and vacation accruals. Contractors aren’t – and their PTO packages are chintzy.

I have friends who have worked for government contractors who were not flexible with flex time or remote work. If you have a chronic condition you are spending all of your PTO going to doctor’s appointments. If you do not have specialized skills outside of library work, a federal job is the absolute best job you can get.

I’m not totally convinced that the people bashing me on Twitter actually know how much it costs to have a chronic health condition. If you have any kind of physical disability or illness, you are spending at least several hundred dollars at the beginning of every year just to hit your deductible, and your spending doesn’t really go down from there. At my last federal job, after I hit my deductible, I was still spending between $200-500 a month just to maintain my health – and that was with solid government health insurance.

One of the people who dragged me online for saying that the CIA was advertising good jobs said that she would prefer to work at WalMart. This is an incredibly ableist comment. There are multiple lawsuits against WalMart because they do not make reasonable accommodations for their employees. WalMart also eliminated greeter positions, which employed many people with disabilities.

This comment is also hypocritical: WalMart causes severe environmental and economic damage on a global scale…just like the CIA!

Effective altruism

The final missing piece of these discussions is the concept of effective altruism. To me, it’s far more unethical for someone who could earn $75,000 to earn $40,000 (the salaries I was being offered in public libraries in Chicagoland).

Even if you can quantify your work as a public or academic librarian and determine that it generates $35,000 in “value” each year, I still think there is serious potential for a bigger social impact if you instead earn that money and direct your resources to social improvements and/or social investing.

(But don’t take my word for it. The most influential moral philosophers and economists of our time have been articulating exactly this position for decades.)

Working for employers like mine gives you a lot of resources. You can use those resources to do great things in your private life. And personally, I’ve accomplished a lot more in my life when I haven’t been worried about my health spiraling out of control and subsequently costing me a job.

My next financial goal (other than having children) is to purchase property suitable for use as a Section 8 rental property. I believe in Section 8 as a program. I think it’s what the government should be doing. I want to provide affordable, high-quality housing for working class people in my community. I think this is how I can have the biggest impact on inequality and everything else the people protesting the CIA claim to care about.

I’m also really looking forward to digging into corporate citizenship initiatives and continuing to leverage my work network for fundraising. Those are resources you’ll never get in the public sector, and this doesn’t even get into the kinds of skills you get in a very short time by working at a high-performing organization. I’ve only been at [REDACTED] for seven months but I am shocked every day by my gains in productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. (More on this in another post, but obviously I hate the article criticizing Pete Buttiegieg for saying that McKinsey was “a place to learn.” It was probably the best objective place for him to build skills. McKinsey would have kept on McKinsey-ing whether or not Pete chose to work there. No company is going to stop being evil because an individual chooses not to work there. On the other hand, an individual can absolutely make a positive structural impact at companies that we think are “evil.”)

I work in a clerical position where I am respected and treated fairly. My MLS is higly relevant to my work, it is respected and valued, and I work with intelligent and driven people who want to make the world better. My employer provides upward paths of mobility to people from diverse backgrounds and is a leader in gender equity and corporate citizenship. My employer gives me the flexibility I need to focus on my health and my family. As a result, I have become more flexible, creative, and a better listener and problem-solver.

Best of all, at the end of the day, I have energy and creativity to give back to my community and care for my family. I think the world is probably a slightly better place because I’m not a librarian living at the poverty line (literally my only other option).

My haters are all keyboard warriors; prove me wrong

Because of my decision to treat my job as a source of income instead of personal meaning, the past year, I’ve:

– gotten multiple trans youth out of abusive living situations and into supportive, stable ones
– exposed an abusive GLBT shelter operator
– provided subsidized housing to first generation librarians of color
– provided employment for multiple disabled people and people of color
– helped women of color receive fair financial settlements when they had been mistreated at work
– connected women of color to employment opportunities
– worked the Hill to reform an arcane and obscure, but incredibly important, disability policy agency (hopefully, more on this to come…)

This does not include my structured volunteer activities (shoutout to the Court Appointed Special Advocates and the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance programs). And I’ve helped a bunch of animals, too. My job’s flexibility allows me to be actively involved in medical care for a chronically ill family member, and will allow me to welcome a child into my family in the near future.

Personally, I think a lot of the people who are so upset about the CIA love to complain on Twitter and flex their social justice bona fides because they have a lot of ennui and suspect, deep down, that their lives are meaningless.

To all my haters, I ask: what have you done lately? With few exceptions (and they must be made for the authors of the open letter, who are undeniably doing good things – I believe their intentions were good and not attention-seeking, but I don’t believe that about most of the other people who are trying to govern by petition), I mostly see my haters:

– complaining on Twitter
– writing open letters and/or blog posts
– acting like victims
– trying to publicly shame people who disagree with them

Am I missing something? Are my haters doing awesome stuff that I should know about?

@ me.

* ETA: Information about law librarianship

A reader was kind enough to share the following:

“While the majority of academic library jobs require both the JD and MLS,  firm jobs don’t, by and large. You posit that you’d still be an unlikely candidate because of the “sheer volume of unemployed JDs,” but some firms even prefer to hire MLS-only candidates because that makes it less likely the librarian will be doing legal work (applying facts to law), which is a big no-no if you’re not licensed to practice in the jurisdiction. For a sample of current law librarian jobs, you can see the SEAALL jobs board, https://seaall.wildapricot.org/employment  , especially the job openings at Miller & Chevalier, Hogan Lovells, and Ogletree Deakins.

[Many jobs] require law firm/legal research experience, so practically speaking one might have to start as a paralegal or at a pretty small firm and work their way up. But no required JD.”

I think I would have been a great paralegal, I’m sad that I graduated from college at a time when those jobs were impossible to get! Do you know anyone with an MLS who has successfully parlayed it into a position as a paralegal? Tell me! I want to interview them for my blog. Even though I make too much money now to change careers, I think this is useful information for other people and I want to share!

Zach collected donations at the door, and Sonali put together this “Blind Date With A Book” raffle.

Could not have asked for a better night. We raised $468 for our scholarship fund. I’m so happy! Here are all the pictures I collected from people.

You can listen to most of the awesome music these great people played at DJ Databasic’s Spotify playlist. I’ve been working out to these jams ever since.

Can’t wait for the next one!

Our final poster (minus ALSC logo)!

Our final report: Connecting Resources, Goals, Statistics, and Stories: Exploring Logic Models as a Means of Valuation in Youth Library Services

Of the 3, the Borghese was hands-down the most memorable experience. The collection was much smaller, and for some reason seemed to have more Carravaggio paintings, which I was all about (the Medusa at the Uffizi was cool, though). They also had a lovely Botticelli:

Unlike the Uffizi, you could actually see this Botticelli!

My friend Raymond recommended this museum, I think, mainly for the fabulous Bernini statues. The Rape of Proserpina was obviously my favorite:

and your little dog, too.

at first I was transfixed by her feet, but Keegan pointed out that Pluto’s fingers are digging into her flesh. Keegan has better photos. I can’t find any closeups online. it was truly astonishing.

the best part of this museum was the ticketing. it was a total pain to get, for some reason they wanted your SSN to purchase which, uh, NO. they sell tickets for a 2-hour window to see the museum. I wish I’d know that they flush the museum at the end of your reservation time, because we would have showed up at our entry time instead of only giving ourselves about an hour. it was easy to avoid tour groups, so none of the obnoxious talking that happens at other museums.

this was honestly the best museum experience I’ve had in my life. i think they let just the right amount of people in, we had a few rooms to ourselves for a few minutes. museums in the US should do this and charge a premium to go (maybe they already do).

ok, back to Florence. 2 museums with Medici origins of some kind. I was not into the Uffizi: way too crowded, and way too many of the same thing, repeated (I felt the same way about the Capitoline). y’all know I love nativity scenes but COME ON.

I much preferred the Pitti Palace: the grounds were super chill to wander, the view of Florence from the top of the hill was choice, and, the interpretation of Rites of Spring in the costume exhibit was far more enjoyable than trying to catch a glimpse of the actual painting at the Uffizi. the Uffizi building was pretty cool, I guess, but man, I don’t think I would have felt like I was really missing anything by not going: the signage, as in most of these museums (the Borghese was the rare exception, and the Pitti Palace actually did have some information; a little less thorough than the Borghese’s, though, which had comments on every piece in every room) was so lacking that half the time I had no idea what I was looking at, it seemed like the Carravaggio room was either closed or they had only 3, all the busts looked the same and CERTAINLY the nativity scenes looked the same.

wow, I am so uncultured!

I asked our presenter about whether they’ve experienced issues with file preservation: things like bit rot, or corruption. He asked someone who worked with the digital objects, who told us that it depended on the file type and image resolution. I’m not sure whether something got lost in translation, or whether this particular project is just too new to have had these issues appear.

What really struck me was the lack of a central, national archival structure in Italy. One would think that federal records would have their own repository: this doesn’t seem to be the case, according to the folks at the state archive in Florence.

Beyond that, it seems that all archives have the same issues: insufficient space, inadequate housing/lack of a suitable environment conducive to preservation.

Didn’t manage to get any photos of the reading room, but here are some from our visit. Note that archives all over the world love to display their collections and do local history exhibits! Didn’t have enough time to pop in on our visit, but it felt like home, and so did the lockers for researchers.

In a stroke of luck, we rode in the elevator with an American researcher who introduced us to the head librarian, Dr. Alessandra Lenzi, who spoke very good English and who was generous enough to show us around the library.

Earlier this week, we visited the Medici Archive Project [writeup of our visit here]. The Galileo Museum Library clarified that the Medici Archive only contains the Medici records relating to affairs of state. Records related to the Medici and Lorraine family collections in art and science are housed at the various museums in Florence. It seems like these museums don’t have a formal relationship with one another – I think, in part because of the Firenze Pass suggesting I expected something akin to “The Smithsonian” museums, which I suppose is our country’s closest thing to a major individual collection spanning several subject-area museums. Here’s a brief overview of the history of the collections at the Galileo Museum. Like the Uffizi Gallery, the museum gives a good overview of how collections arrived in their holdings.

The highlight of our tour was visiting the rare books room: we got to see an instruction manual written by Galileo, one of his first books, and certainly the first printing, devoted to Cosimo de Medici and intended for use in the field by military officers. We also got to see a Medici printing of Galileo’s complete works, less the ones banned by the Catholic Church at the time of publication. Keegan didn’t bring out his camera until the end, and immediately left for Japan, so his photos of the reading room will be added later….

We also reviewed the online catalog with Dr. Lenzi. I was just so impressed – their search engine is pretty close to what I imagined a federated search would be, and searches all the images of their collection! I guess they have an extensive, older image collection of past museum inventories, and there are catalog entries for individual museum objects, so, you can do a full-text search that includes the descriptions of Galileo’s instruments. There’s also a robust subject search – this really seemed like an example of the “linked open data” we talked about in my Indexing, Abstracting, and Thesaurus Construction class.

Dr. Lenzi told us that one of the staff’s major initiatives is to flesh out Wikipedia pages to increase awareness of the library’s collection – they upload document lists as citations in certain entries, and include information about the library’s primary sources in biography pages of prominent Florentines represented in the historic books and documents. [note to self – email her to get links to the library’s “sandbox” page on wikipedia]

Also learned that there is a regional governmental organization that has to approve digitization projects – can’t recall the name, but a quick glance at the Firenze Card website really shows how many players there are in this space in Italy:

the Firenze card…is promoted by Municipality of Florence, the Ministry for the Arts and Cultural Activities, the Regional Direction of Cultural Heritage, the Special Superintendence for Historical, Artistic and Ethnic-anthropological Heritage and for the Museum Circuit of the city of Florence, the Province of Florence and the Chamber of Commerce of Florence

Enough about libraries: my “7 Churches Walk” with Heather and Keegan proved prescient, since the Pope said Mass at St. John Lateran and led a procession to Santa Maria Maggiore to commemorate the feast of Corpus Christi. Dr. Chancellor and I went – we stood quite close to the center aisle, close to the 22nd row of nuns seated. I was glad to have attended a few of the morning services at the Convitto, since I was able to follow along pretty well and knew some of the responses. This experience has given me a deeper appreciation of the vision of the new translation of the Roman missal, it really is closer to what the rest of the world says. There were priests and nuns from all over the world at the Mass, I felt like I saw all of humanity there.

Representing @catholicuniv @CUA_LIS about 500 feet from "Sante Padre Francesco," it was pretty awesome #CUArome pic.twitter.com/sqJuU878zc

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) June 4, 2015

Corpus Christi Celebratory Mass with Pope Francis! – with @Anitalifedotcom (Visions of Italy) @CUA_LIS @CUArome pic.twitter.com/lpxSahzXfd

— Renate Chancellor (@rchancell) June 4, 2015

Also, riding the #3 streetcar in Rome is infinitely more pleasant than the subway. I’m not really that opposed to the bus outside of rush hour periods, but I think we must have been on a particularly busy line because the 71 always seemed pretty crowded.

Still can’t believe I got to see a book Galileo touched, and the Pope, in one day, this trip rules!

A 1599 map illustrating Rome’s 7 Pilgrim Churches [source: Wikipedia]

There is definitely some papal connection to the basilicas featured on this walk, as we saw Il Papa himself, not a week later, at St. John Lateran followed by a procession to Santa Maria Maggiore.

This was a REALLY frustrating walk to take. I’m not sure how Heather even heard about it, because there was not a whole lot of information online about it (the directions were kind of wonky) and certainly NO signage whatsoever along the route. I’m sure there must be 5 Santa Maria churches in Rome, at least, on each side of the river, probably, and there is an entire neighborhood called “San Lorenzo” so we had very bad luck trying to ask for the church of the same name. Also, of course the hours the churches are closed aren’t posted anywhere online (these churches close sometime between 12-3pm, and good luck figuring it out for the smaller ones).

One thing I noticed in Rome was that the Internet just does not have great information. It occurred to me when I was writing this blog post to use Google to search BOOKS and I came up with more thorough information about these churches. The Wikipedia article about the Seven Pilgrim Churches talks about the history of Roman churches as a destination for pilgrims and tourists, and the parallel history of the guidebooks describing these pilgrimage sites.

I really can’t believe that these historic routes don’t have any signage. A few people we met at the various churches did seem to know what we were up to, but the employee at the information desk in St John Lateran didn’t know where any of the other churches on the route were! I’m surprised there aren’t brochures about the walk INSIDE the churches on the route. This seems like a missed opportunity.

Listening to the guest speakers in our course speak about the Roman economy made me realize how inextricably culture and economy are bound. I thought about this when looking at the chintzy ticket booths and machines inside churches. You don’t see promotions the same way in Rome (but you kind of do in Florence, they gave us a coupon for the La Specola natural history museum at the Galileo Museum). It seems like there are so many peripheral and auxiliary businesses that could be doing so much more than employing aggressive waiters on the sidewalks and sending out faux-uniformed tour guides….