Email, Setting up

Apparently this whole electronic mail thing (a.k.a. "email" or "the email") is really catching on. To stay in the loop, you might want to set up an account and make yourself contactable. Don't know anyone who has email? Sign up for a listserv to make some new library friends.

Or send a message to your newly-emailable (yet ever anonymous) editors of A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette at polite.librarian@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Panic, Inducing

When your next library committee meeting works its way down to Other Items on the agenda, ask the room, "What if we eliminated the use of costly LC Subject headings in favor of patron-initiated tagging and social bookmarking in our catalog?"

As mass hysteria ensues, quietly slip out and return to your office for a quiet cup of coffee and a few hours of Text Twist.

Lifetime appointment, Recieving a

Academic librarians retire, die, or take better paying jobs. They do not get fired. Unless you are prone to felony crimes, this glorious job is yours until you choose to leave it. Yes, you have a de facto lifetime appointment.

Take advantage of this fact by doing just enough to jump through the promotion/tenure hoops, then coast into retirement with as little work ethic as you care to muster.

Elephants (or whatever), Addressing

There are often unspoken issues in library meetings that everyone knows exist, but that no one wants to address. Instead, librarians tend to talk around the real problems without getting to the root of it all. Examples include our desperate grasping for relevancy, our reliance on pitiful software vendors, ineffective management, etc. Any such issue is often referred to as "the elephant in the room." Or "the elephant in the corner." And sometimes the elephant is pink. Or purple.

One good way to force everyone in the meeting to address the unspoken issue is to come up with creative things to call it. Put your heads together and brainstorm. Here are some ideas to get you started...

• the dead elephant on the table
• the pink moose in the corner
• the 300 lb. gorilla at the door
• the turd in the breadbox
  

Once you've reached consensus on a clever thing to call it, addressing the problem will be a piece of cake. Just don't feed the cake to the elephant.

Lanyards, Wearing

One way to judge the quality of a library conference or meeting is to check out the lanyards that are provided to registrants. Lanyards come in a variety of styles: the stretchy, the logo-emblazoned, the too-long, the too-short. The ones that dip your name badge into your soup. The two-ended shoestring style. The looped ones with clips. The ones that make people lean in uncomfortably close while trying to read your name. And the ones that always twist around backwards.

Defining what makes a quality lanyard is a matter of personal preference.

If you find one you like, hang on to it, and wear it at any subsequent conferences you attend. Traveling with your own favorite lanyard is one of the subtle, yet distinct, details that say to the world, "Yes, I'm a librarian."

If that's not enough, the world can just read your name badge.

Work, Doing

At some point in your professional library career, you may be faced with a task or project that just won't go away. You can't delegate it to your library's staff. There's no library committee with jurisdiction over it. And for whatever reason, you can't create one. There's not enough time to slough the thing off onto a fellow librarian. And ignoring it won't make it go away. You can't talk your way out of it. You'll find yourself painted into a corner and the only way out is to bite the bullet and...

(gulp)

... actually work.

Should one of these rare occasions present itself, purposely perform the assigned task as poorly as you can. And turn it in late. Hopefully your poor performance will keep anyone from ever asking you to "do work" again.

Remember: a reputation of incompetence can serve you well in the future.

Racist blogs, Authoring

Don’t author racist or otherwise intolerant blogs chronicling your hatred of Muslims, immigrants, amputees, women, etc. It really ruins the librarians as liberal defenders of civil liberties thing the rest of us are so proud of. Not only are such blogs mean, they’re also terribly tacky.