Whatever It Takes

“‘She was a quiet, brilliant thinker,’ said Diane Geraci, interim codirector of libraries at MIT, who added that Ms. Wolpert ‘worked harder than anyone I knew.’…When Ms. Wolpert wasn’t staying late in her office, she traveled widely giving speeches and sharing ideas with librarians around the world.” — Melissa Hanson, obituary for Ann Wolpert in The Boston Globe

I never had the opportunity to meet or work with Ann Wolpert, the late director of libraries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What I know of her I learned by reading her obituaries. Reading those, I wondered what rock I’ve been hiding under for the past seventeen years. Why was I so unaware of her and her work? I felt chastised by my ignorance.

At the same time, I felt challenged by her legacy and by the observations of those who knew her best. I was especially drawn to those comments quoted above which spoke to her work ethic and energy. One of my colleagues, now working on the East coast, once described me as the hardest working archivist he knew. I was pleased by the comment at the time. But I think anything I might have offered, then or now, pales in comparison to what Ms. Wolpert accomplished during her career at MIT.

Inexplicably (or not, as the case might be), I thought about Ann Wolpert ten days ago, while in the woods of central Minnesota. I was deer hunting with my eldest son. On opening morning my son downed a large buck. Unfortunately, the buck expired in the middle of a swamp. Yards and yards of boggy water, some of it up to our thighs, separated us from the deer. Leaving the buck was not an option; it needed to be retrieved, brought to dry land, field dressed, hauled back to our truck, and eventually taken to the meat market for processing. It was not easy work, but we needed to do what any responsible hunter would do: tend to our quarry and bring it home. Nearly three hours later, soaked to the bone by chilly water and wind, exhausted by the long haul—some of it across a recently disked and muddy farm field—we lifted the buck into the back of the truck, drained our boots of water, put on warm socks, and rested. After a short interval, I headed back to the woods; there were more hours to hunt and my field lunch awaited me at the base of a tree.

This might seem like a strange juxtaposition—thinking about an influential member of my profession at the same time I was engaged in the struggles of a sport some might question (or object to). My purpose here is not to argue the benefits of a hunt (or the rich bibliographic trail such an activity engenders). Instead, what I am asserting is that my recollection of Ms. Wolpert’s legacy in the middle of a Minnesota swamp made—and makes—perfect sense when thinking about our work and profession. There are times when what we do, and how we do what we do, demand attention and action. Moments will confront us, as they did for Ann Wolpert (and me in the swamp), when the time for talk ends, when we must act. Inaction is not an option. To do nothing, or to ignore the situation presented to us, is unacceptable. We need to move, act, and accomplish the thing set before us.

There is more than a hint of this inexorable confrontation (and how it should be faced) in the obituary of Ms. Wolpert written by Nate Nickerson of the MIT News Office.

Wolpert began work at MIT just as the Internet was emerging, and her tenure was marked by her passionate response to the opportunity and upheaval that resulted for research libraries. In scientific, research, and university communities around the world, a debate, still unresolved, came to the fore: how the decades-old system of peer-reviewed scholarly journals ought to operate in the digital world.

Wolpert became a leading voice in that discussion; she argued for unrestricted online access to journal articles. In a February 2013 essay in the New England Journal of Medicine, she not only made the case for such access: She also called it an inevitability. “There is no doubt,” she wrote, “that the public interests vested in funding agencies, universities, libraries, and authors, together with the power and reach of the Internet, have created a compelling and necessary momentum for open access. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be inexpensive, but it is only a matter of time.”

I have argued with myself in the past, and in these posts, about expectations—those set for us by others and those motivated from within ourselves. I objected to what I felt were unreasonable or unjust expectations, of being told that my work was more than forty hours a week, that I needed to do “whatever it takes” to accomplish my job. I still object to a life that does not allow necessary re-creation or rest, what some ancients called Shabbat, a Sabbath (or an occasional sabbatical of study and writing). And I reject a lifestyle and profession that puts work above all else. Such priorities are out of whack and out of place.

But what Ann Wolpert taught me, even in her passing, is that there are certain times and places—even within the twelve to seventeen hour days I have occasionally endured in the last weeks—when you need to recognize certain imperatives demanded by our profession, by our work, and by situations staring you straight in the face. In those moments it is time to double down, buckle down, and get the job done—whatever it takes. “It won’t be easy, and it won’t be inexpensive, but it is only a matter of time.”

30th Year Reflections/25: In the Woods

“For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it.”— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I am not worried about catching up on a blog entry if, perhaps, I miss a week or two. I figure everything will even out in the end. All the same, I missed a spot a couple of weeks ago and now have time to fill in the blank. I do so with some slight hesitancy as my absence—which I’ll speak of in a moment—was due to the pleasure of an avocation, one probably not enjoyed by a large number of librarians. I was in the woods hunting white-tailed deer.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot in the library literature about professional hobbies or avocations. A casual search turned up just a few articles, one directing me to a list of websites with interesting titles. Anything having to do with hobbies, so the literature has me believe, also has to do with our “image.” Frankly, I’m tired of discussions about librarians’ image. They don’t do anything for me and I think do very little for the profession—except to confirm that we have an image problem or suffer low self-esteem. Following along with the stereotype I’m sure many folks believe librarians’ hobbies include (or are limited to) reading and gardening and cookery. And they might be right. Librarians like to read and garden and cook. I like to read. I like to garden. I like to cook. But I also like to hunt. Other librarians like to do other things in their free time. We’re not all cut from the same cloth.

I like to be out in the woods before the break of day, to sit quietly and watch the world come alive, to find myself moving from darkness to light as the indistinguishable gains shape and form with the coming of the sun. I am pleased by a skill, gained over many years, of sitting still—absolutely still—to the point at which I am confused for a tree or the stump of a tree, as a chickadee lands on the barrel of my gun, mistaking it for a branch. I am thrilled to sit in such silence, senses on edge to movement and echo and smell, as the sound of wind under wings swooshes above me or the crackling twig or rustling leaf announces a new arrival in the woods. I have heard Thoreau’s owl in the distance and the dawn. Sometimes such sounds announce my quarry, the steady crunch over ice-glazed snow or dried leaves coming nearer. Most of the time, in such circumstances, I meet with success and in so doing experience a holy moment know mostly to those native to this land. It is a moment of respect and of thankfulness. There is no joy in a blood sport but rather a testimony to the woods themselves and those who created them, to a circle of life.

There is something mystical or divine here and perhaps hard to explain to a non-hunter. Those few days I have in the woods are the most restorative of the year. Plunk me down on a stump or stone in the middle of a wood, give me two or three quiet days, and once back in the office I’m good to go for another year. I have been a hunter since the age of fourteen or fifteen; I started fishing when I was three. Much of this time has been spent in the company of my father. Now into his ninth decade, he’s put hunting to the side; my sons and daughter fill the vacuum. It is a tradition passed on from generation to generation. It is a time bursting with memories.

Part of this, frankly, involves research—something librarians are good at. You need to know your prey, know your woods, know your limits. For the past fifteen years I’ve hunted on private land with family and friends. I knew the land; scouted it; walked its paths, watering holes, and resting beds. This year I hunted on public land, in one of the many wildlife management areas operated by our state department of natural resources. Before I headed into the woods I studied maps and aerial photographs. I knew where trails led, what the terrain offered, what vegetation I would encounter. It was a new adventure, in a new place, but linked in so many ways to memories and places past. This new experience allowed me to take a well-developed skill set and apply it in a new way, in a new time and place.

In the end I saw few deer; there is no new venison in my freezer. But the sound that greeted me mid-morning of the first day, a thunderous romp that materialized from the west into three large does bounding majestically through the woods is a sight and sound that will stay with me to the end of my days—and get me through those times in the office when I can only dream of the woods.