Navigating the Family Tree...

In my research I do not question my respondents' faith (though I can explore its impact on a persons' life and community.)  On a personal level the people I meet, from across the Christian spectrum, often challenge my own faith.  It has been an unintended yet rewarding part of my research experience.

But I am reminded of an old joke:

A man died and went to heaven, and Saint Peter took him on a tour. He showed him the harps, the streets of gold, the cherubs. The man noticed that there were groups of people gathered in different spots, so he asked about them. “Those over there, sitting quietly and looking very serious—those are the Presbyterians. And those eating the big potluck meal—those are the Methodists. The ones with all the tambourines are the Pentecostals.” As he went on, the man noticed one group set apart from the others. “What about them over there?” he asked. “Keep your voice down,” Peter said. “Those are the Baptists, and they think they’re the only ones here.”

Lots of stereotypes here! I have heard this joke naming different groups, but this version hits home for me.  It points out the fragmentation of Christianity: divided by history, culture, and theology. 

Also I am a Baptist.  It is neither the tradition I was born into (Roman Catholicism) nor raised in (Plymouth Brethren) but the one that I have chosen.  The Baptist tradition does interpret the Bible's standard for membership in the family of God narrowly.  Jesus' words in the Gospel of Luke are oft cited: “Enter through the narrow gate.  For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."   It is more than religious prejudice (though there exists some of that too.)  Baptists often describe faith and salvation in different terms than Catholics, Anglicans, Pentecostals, Mennonites, United Church, etc.  Sometimes the differences are semantic and sometimes substantive; differences we can gloss over and differences that are deal breakers.  There are groups that come knocking on my door that might consider themselves Christian but are so fundamentally different as to be another religion.  There is also the concern among Baptists that many in mainline Christian denominations are culturally Christian but have no personal faith.  I have heard members of mainline groups express the same concerns "that the mission field is in our own pews."  To be fair, I believe there are also many cultural Christians in Baptist Churches.  Canadian Sociologist Reg Bibby reminded us in Restless Churches that evangelicals have our own home missions.

In my research I engage with Christians whose beliefs and practices are different from mine.  I also encounter those whose relationships with God seems personal, powerful, and far deeper than mine.  So I am faced with a conflict.  I cannot ignore theology.  Theology transforms my worldview and enables me to interpret my experience.  I must reject some teachings as incompatible with what I understand from the Bible.  That is a Christian responsibility.  But I am know that God does not require perfect theology to be part of His family (which is good or I wouldn't get past the Pearly Gates!)  The requirements to be saved are remarkably few. 


The researcher must maintain his objectivity.  The believer will take each profession of faith at face value.  I will explore each faith story to understand it and on the word of their testimony I will consider them my brother and sister in the faith regardless of the church they attend.  Hopefully they will do the same for me.  We'll work on their theology later (and perhaps they will try to work on mine.)


Enjoy this short video from the folks at Muddy River Media on the Entrance Interview for Heaven.

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Yielding the Middle: the Decline (and Fall?) of the Academic Library

From where I sit I can see Gibbons "The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" on my bookshelf.  It seems pretentious to claim to understand all the factors that led to Rome's collapse, though many historians has attempted to do so.  Equally pretentious would be my assessment of the decline (and fall?) of the Academic Library.  I have blogged before about academic libraries, sometimes optimistically and often not.  Librarianship is experiencing a sea change no doubt, and times are hard for academic libraries in Canada.  When my own library opened its new building in 1989 there were 19-20 staff; when I joined the library in 2000 I think there were 14 staff and a small army of part-time students.  Now we have 10 staff; a handful of students, and an a growing belief that if anyone leaves they will not be replaced.  I'm not a stats guy but I see where this is heading. 

When I scan the national librarian jobsites (FIMS, FIS, LibraryJobs, CLA) I believe I see a disquieting trend: a rise in the percentage of part-time or term academic librarian positions, and the downgrading of existing positions to lower paying entry level (a form of ageism but that is another post.)  I regularly provide job references for new library school graduates and I know it is a hard market.  Collection budgets, once protected from cuts, are now relentlessly being whittled away.  Some might like to describe this as a re-tooling to be a new lean mean fighting machine.  I think it is something else.

I fear as a profession we are yielding the middle ground.  I'm referring to the Ackoff's Data-Information-Knowledge hierarchy where data are those disorganized facts and observations that becomes usable information when given structure and context and thus meaning.  Knowledge then might be thought of as information applied; where experience, skills, and information are combined to address a problem.  I do these concepts an injustice by my brevity but you get the idea.

Data was the domain of researchers; they created data, managed it, structured it, and created new information.  Then that new information became the domain of librarians, who created structures to preserve it and make it accessible.  Ideally practitioners would take that new information we provide and use it in applied ways for the good of society.  Again an over-simplification.  There were gaps in the system, not all that info got into the hands of practitioners which is why there is a new emphasis on Knowledge Mobilization. 

In the information age, information access is big business, and academic libraries lost their monopoly.  We began to scramble to find a new role, increasingly yielding that middle ground to the Corporate Information Services offering "comprehensive one point of access", and looking instead to the other sides of the pyramid.  Academic Libraries have seen an opportunity, as research data has grown in size and complexity, to become curators of that data.  But they aren't the only ones, and we have no monopoly.  My non-sensitive research projects, for example, are housed on commercial project management sites.  They offer shared access and scalability tools beyond the capacity of most Canadian academic libraries.  Open Access repositories offer some possibilities but how many repositories does a country Canada's size need.  As positions like data analysts become the new hot career choice,  Library/Information Schools who may be facing declining enrollment are focusing more on data, as are the faculties of Management and Computer Science.  The other growth priority is knowledge management particularly in business, though this has not attracted the attention of academic libraries. 

I wonder what comes next.  What will the campus look like A.L. (After Libraries)?  What do librarians do when libraries become simply student centers?  If they have technology skills they migrate to university IT departments.  If they have field research or project management skills they can slide into research centers.  Many will simple retire or drop out.  Perhaps I am being needlessly morose and melancholy, but I have another 19 years until retirement.  I need to be thinking ahead.

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Borrowing from the World or being Strategic?

After a long hiatus I am back to my doctoral research.  There were a few times over the past year when I felt like giving up.  I am inspired by a college roommate who recently successfully defended his dissertation after long years and personal struggles.  He might not think he is an academic inspiration but he is. :-)

So what did I do on a mild Saturday morning beginning a week of vacation?  I met with one of my research congregations for a three hour visioning and operational structuring meeting.  Yes, it was a good meeting and I learned a lot.  Coincidentally, I have spent a lot of time recently engaged in workplace strategic planning processes.  Several of the processes and activities discussed in the church meeting were similar like SWOT analyses and Balanced Scorecards.  Secular strategic planning theory and practices are increasingly being used by church organizations, as well as theories about marketing, media, and communication.  These are not without controversy, and the churches I've met with who have taken this direction are very conscious that they are not businesses like Harvey's or The Bay, or even service groups like the Kiwanas.  They are very concerned with remaining faithful.

On the long bus ride home I had time to think about what might make a church process different from a corporate process.  I thought of three possible differences:

1. The meeting began with prayer.  At one critical junction someone asked "do we need to stop and pray before we vote." 
   
   I believe that my respondents saw this as more than a religious formality; they invited God into their process.  I've previously blogged about prayer in information seeking.  Whether you believe in the active involvement of a God in the activities of people (I do) or not, the participants in the churches I have studied do believe in it.  This will affect the process adding both weight (God is among us) and expectation (God leads us).
2.  A church is predominately a volunteer organization.
   
   Are paid employees more or less motivated to engage with the organizational vision than volunteer staff?  I think it would make a difference.  Larger churches do tend to have a number of salaried staff, but in few cases are these positions well paid.  They aren't there for the money; staff and volunteers are largely motivated by a sense of calling to the work of the organization.  Is the level of "buy-in" the same for corporations?
   
   
3. A vision rooted in faith is very powerful.
   
   Employees of corporate organizations may have strong service ethics, lofty ideals, and the desire to pursue excellence.  These would all inform their visioning and strategic planning.  But when a vision is rooted in one's personal faith how does that change things?  One of my former directors used to say when we would get riled about something "It is only a library, nobody will die."  She was not saying what we were doing was not important or necessary but that we had to put things into perspective.  By contrast when someone says they believe in the eternal spiritual results of the work of the church in people's lives, how does this re-shape how we view the guiding vision and planning of the church?  This certainly came through in the church meeting I attended.

This is worth exploring deeper, and I have a strategic planning trainer friend who will be getting a visit from me soon as I wrestle through this. :-)

As Dilbert is the final authority on strategic planning I will let him have the last word.  May none of our strategic planning processes be like this.

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Mayans, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Google

So it's Saturday, Dec. 22nd. The World is still here (assuming the world didn't actually end, and then was replaced with a replica by the white mice but that's another story.)

There is something about apocalyptic prophecies that fascinate the Western consciousness.  The most recent of course are Harold Camping's end of the world on May 21, 2012 (later amended to October 21st, 2012), and now the Mayan Calendar end on December 21st, 2012.  I would have thought after May 21st online interest would wane but December 21st generated an even higher number of Google searches.

When you start looking at the Canadian search data you note that we paid little attention to the May 21st prophecies unlike our American neighbours, but we were very interested in Googling December 21st. Alberta and New Brunswick folks were searching "The End of the World", Saskatchewan and PEI focused on "Mayan Calendar", and La Belle Province was looking up "Fin du Monde."

This week I also noted Google's new project to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum. This will open up the study of the original texts to a new generation of Bible and Religion scholars.  Yes, we have had transcriptions and translations, but as my Old Testament Professor Gus used to say "Do you understand what the text actually looks like?  Do you see the shape of the manuscript?"  You can see hesitations in the script, erased characters, and even modified texts, that aren't apparent in transcription.  My imagination conjures up images of the ancient scribe as he painstakingly and reverently copied his scroll.  Hopefully, this digital archive will spark new avenues of research.  One popular text is The War Scroll (1QM), popularly known as "The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness."  The scroll builds on Biblical traditions of the End of Days from the Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezekiel.  I don't doubt that this digital publication will also spark a new wave of interest in this text by amateur Biblical scholars and prophets; new fuel for the apocalyptically inclined.

The Internet is a powerful place to share belief, to engage with the faithful, and to ask difficult questions.   Speculation also runs wild here, tapping into our deepest fears.  We want to know what will happen next because we live in uncertain times.  I admit to uncertainties about my own future direction as I weigh life's decisions.  But on the big question "will the world be here tomorrow" that I can at least let go and not concern myself.  My faith puts me at ease that I do know, as the old hymn says, Who holds the future.  But I am fascinated with our quests online; we are hungry to know the unknowable.  Mostly we are going off on our own little pilgrimages, but occasionally our journeys overlap in a big way, as this week when we collectively tried to pull aside the curtain, and take a peek at tomorrow.  What will be the next nexus of faith online?

Photo credit: "Don't Panic", Patrick Hoesly, http://www.flickr.com/photos/zooboing/4637192255/

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