Heads up people!  Serious library users aren't interested in your
personalities!

When I started my MA in Art History at York University in Toronto I was
a single mother with four kids between the ages of ten and fifteen, I
was writing about art on a regular basis for three different magazines,
travelling to the East Coast on magazine business once a year, to the
West Coast to do thesis research every summer, and battling with the
court system to finalize a divorce.  It took me an hour and fifteen
minutes to commute to the university campus, another hour and a quarter
to get home to my kids at the end of a day.  Every minute of my time as
a graduate student cost me money.  If, at that time, I had had to deal
with someone behind a reference desk in a Fine Arts library who didn't
know what the Art Index was (the example my husband gave in his article
for Art Documentation) I would have filed a complaint.  And if she'd had
one of those perky did-you-want-fries-with-that personalities I would
have wanted to hit her.

But of course it's a moot point because I have completed three
university degrees and am closing in on a PhD without ever having made
contact with a librarian.

I want to say that we, as a family, have been amazed at the furor that
has arisen from the article in Art Documentation and the ensuing
 discussion' on the ARLIS list - especially the assumption, based on a
single ill-considered remark by a stranger, that my husband has
"personality problems" that prevent him from working well with other
people.  For the record Gary has team-work experience librarians could
only dream of.  In his twenties, he was a hard rock miner in Northern
Ontario, working with high explosives - team-work at a life and death
level.   As a social worker, when he was in his thirties,  he
specialized in teaching independent living skills to young, mentally
handicapped men.  Do you have any idea how sensitive that kind of work
can be? Among the e-mails we received privately was a particularly
patronizing series of messages - all from the same person - suggesting
he "learn the softer skills that would help him work with other
people."  What could be "softer" than guiding a young man with Downs
Syndrome through a social occasion like inviting his parents for their
first visit to his new home?  He left social work because it is
physically taxing (24 hour shifts) and because it is emotionally
heartbreaking.  Step-parenting requires some tricky skills too and I
want to say that those four kids mentioned above are now young adults,
working all over the world, who all took time on Fathers Day to say how
much they still appreciate what he has brought to our family.

In fact I do think his personality makes him unsuited to library work of
any kind - who wants a gregarious middle-aged man with a lively
intellect and visible hockey-scars in a place as dull as a library!

The point my husband was trying to make in his graduating paper ( and
the article that was distilled from it) is that there should be a place
for subject knowledge in an academic library, a perception of service
that includes expertise, and a way in which a library school degree
could build consciously on the expertise an in-coming student brings to
the program.  Schools may vary, but his experience was specific.  At UBC
the atmosphere was anti-intellectual, the level of work expected was
frustratingly banal, and none of the regular graduate school standards
seemed to be in place.  I was a PhD student in the School of
Communication at Simon Fraser University (I've since switched to
History) while Gary was at UBC and it was clear to both of us at the
time that UBC-SLAIS could be eaten alive by CMNS at SFU.  They simply do
too many of the same things, and more, at a much higher level.

If you are going to generate conference sessions based on the Art
Documentation article or the  discussion' that followed perhaps you
could start with one on professionalism.

Kit Lort-Ditchburn, BFA, BA, MA, ABD, Victoria, BC

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